Honestly, before I picked up an Octatrack I had no idea about sampling, didn’t like hip-hop or vaporwave or any of those sample-heavy genres, and was just looking to make ambient washes of guitar noise a la Robert Fripp. You guys got me hooked on mangling, chopping, and generally repurposing existing sounds as an art form, and once I started doing it I basically vomited forth two albums and an EP onto my old Bandcamp page within a couple of months.
Once I got that out of my system and was reassured by the general positive feedback I got here and elsewhere, I wanted to get as much out of the Octatrack as possible from a studio perspective. I’m stage-shy, so I toyed with a lot of ways to automate the OT’s parameters, from the Arranger itself to several external sequencers, and even considered abandoning it altogether for something like an MPC. But it kept calling me back. So fast, so flexible, so much potential! The eventual solution was an old QY-70 box made by Yamaha in the 90’s, which let me program in pattern changes, effects sweeps, and melodies for my external synths.
Enough about the how, what is this thing? Well, this album kind of picks up where the last one left off, with an emphasis on using sampled material that has personal meaning to me, rather than just looking for a nice beat. I wanted to explore my own roots as a former classical/prog/fusion/soundtrack nerd in the context of sampling. I wondered, what would DJ Premier or Pete Rock create if they weren’t into R&B, but were into Allan Holdsworth or Mr. Bungle? On top of that foundation, I added original chords and tunes from my teens and twenties, when I was writing stuff that I hoped would be the next epic concept album. They live in a strange sonic landscape now, alongside the music that originally inspired them, but in a totally different neighborhood than I ever predicted.
Rado Z. over at AMDISCS agreed to release the album on his weird and wonderful label, just before my birthday. I don’t know how to promote myself, so I’m coming back to where it all started to thank everyone for listening, providing gear suggestions, and generally being an awesome community of artists who opened my eyes to a totally new way of making music. I think I really hit the nail on the head with what I was going for with “The Quiet Car”, which you can listen to here:
EDIT: for some reason the video is region-locked to the US, so here’s another streaming link:
