The uplifting choir bits at the very beginning and very end of this 1950s Christmas pop song sound a bit like weird moaning when slowed down.
Many of these pop songs have virtually no instrumental parts, so the only sections that aren’t full of voice are the intro and the outro.
All of my Christmas songs this year are fundraising for the Hackney Night shelter, which my wife has been volunteering at. There are very few shelter beds in East London. This roving shelter makes up a large percentage of them.
This piece uses the sax solo from another baby boomer favourite Christmas song. The title was provided by a member of the Mastodon social network, @mattamatic@wandering.shop.
All of my Christmas songs this year are fundraising for the Hackney Night shelter, which my wife has been volunteering at. There are very few shelter beds in East London. This roving shelter makes up a large percentage of them.
This was inspired by (and titled from) my favourite holiday meme.
All of my Christmas songs this year are to fundraising for the Hackney Night shelter, which my wife has been volunteering at. There are very few shelter beds in East London. This roving shelter makes up a large percentage of them.
I kind of hope this is the last year I ever have to hear ‘Baby it’s Cold Outside’ as anything other than a bad example.
It comes from a romantic comedy from the 1940s, as a sound track to a scene in which the female lead is trying desperately to escape a Pepe le Pew-like character. This then cuts to an inversion of the scene where a foreign man is trying to escape a woman. That inversion is played with physical comedy.
This song has been covered countless times, but the only versions I could find with the aggressive-woman variation were two sketches starring Miss Piggy.
This cut up uses one line from the film version, plus a few measures of bridge section from that recording.
All of my Christmas songs this year are to fundraising for the Hackney Night shelter, which my wife has been volunteering at. There are very few shelter beds in East London. This roving shelter makes up a large percentage of them.
There are two versions of Bing Crosby singing ‘white Christmas’ on YouTube. One is an older recording, full of hiss and pops and the other is the official version put up by his record company. The official version is much shorter and, despite being remastered, is a lower-effort production.
This is a remix of both versions. The vevo recording has been run through Paulstretch. The older version I manually cut up into 1 or 2 bar phrases. I wrote a SuperCollider script to loop the phrases, cut them up and navigate through them. This is all of that mixed together, plus one word from the song.
The song was originally about nostalgia and climate change – he used to know Christmases with snow. Now the song itself is laden with a nostalgia and wording that has been troubling co-oped. I think it’s important to keep the climate aspects central to the song’s ongoing meaning
All of my Christmas songs this year are to fundraising for the Hackney Night shelter, which my wife has been volunteering at. There are very few shelter beds in East London. This roving shelter makes up a large percentage of them.
Once again this year, I’m doing a series of Christmas music where every piece is written within a few hours. All of the pieces this year will be at least loosely based on the Vaporwave genre. Today’s song is a remix of Judy Garland singing ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.’
She sounded like she was already a bit merry to me on the recording, but then I ran it through Paulstretch and expanded it by 8 times the duration and it became suddenly clear that this song is actually made up entirely of existential anguish. This remix uses an 8x stretch, a 30x stretch and a little bit of normal speed, all assembled in SuperCollider.
This year, I am fundraising for the Hackney Night shelter, which my wife has been volunteering at. There are very few shelter beds in East London. This roving shelter makes up a large percentage of them.
Commissioned and titled by sevenhelz in honour of Deathboy.
This piece is influenced by the Vaporwave genre and movement and was written in SuperCollider. The melody is based on a markov chain of common melodic gestures. The instrument is based on the ‘Epic Sax’ code by Rukano. The bassline is adapted from the help file on Patterns. The plucking instrument’s durations is quarter divisions of random durations used by the melody, which is what gives it it’s slightly odd character.
Commissioned and titled by sevenhelz in honour of Deathboy.
This piece was written in SuperCollider. All of the sounds are generated using the Gendyn4 UGen, which is based on descriptions of stochastic synthesis published by Iannis Xenakis in Formalised Music. This means that the timbre is generated by probabilities. The ‘pitches’ and sound controls are also controlled by random numbers, repeated in a structured pattern.
The sounds change to become more resonant over the course of the piece. The addition of reverb is what primarily gives the piece its character.
This piece was commissioned by lesbiancockslut.com [NSFW]
When commissioned, I appealed on twitter for people to send me dick pics. Specifically, encrypted dick picks, to highlight that various national governments are spying on our sexts. In return, I was sent two unecrpyted images and one encrypted one. The unlocked images were of a tin of spotted dick, and a rooster (known to the English as a ‘cock’). The encrypted image was of the sender’s ‘friend, Richard.’
I took these files and played them as if they were wav files. Compressed and encrypted files sound like white noise, so I took the two unencrypted images and converted them to raw image formats. I then converted those to raw audio and used them as samples.
The pitches and rhythms in the piece are taken from a hymn that was popular in American Catholic churches when I was a child.
I’ve recently learned about this genre, which was invented by teenagers doing deconstructive remixes of 80’s and early 90’s commercial culture ephemera. They take audio and video samples of brick and mortar consumer culture and cultural nostalgia to create criticism of pre-online capitalism, as far as I understand it.
I stumbled onto this genre shortly after finishing my Christmas album and realised that that it was very close to what I was already doing. I also had the much more disconcerting twin realisation that early 90’s muzak was a formative musical influence, due to how much I was subject to it during an impressionable age.
For this study, I took the advert for the Cupertino Inn and cut out all of the (extremely awkward) narration and was left only with the very muzak-y background. Because my editing was abrupt cuts, which did not adjust for beat matching, I decided to use granular-style techniques for cutting the audio, but with extremely oversized ‘grains’. I put this over a looped, half speed playback of the cut audio.
For the video, I used ffmpeg to spit out 12 frames a second as jpegs. I then used a python script to glitch every frame and reassembled the video. I editted them together in openshot, which, due to my inexperience, played the video at 12.5 fps, so I looped the closing image.
I picked this advert because I have a relationship with this hotel and because I thought it was extremely odd that they made an advert in 2010 that so completely and unintentionally embraced 80’s nostalgia and human misery. The Cupertino Inn is under new management in the last two years and has updated it’s vibe and furnishings. It is now a nice hotel. You should stay there, not only because I have a financial interest in you doing so.
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I Saw the Mummy Killing Santa Claus
