My current involvement in (classical) musical things

With the return of school, I find myself increasingly busy. It’s been enough to halt just about anything musical that’s not somehow tied to school. Not that there’s any shortage of those. I’m in the Anchorage Youth Symphony, the school orchestra, AP Music Theory, and working with a few other people to start a school String Club.

My electronic compositions have been put on hold until I can get a handle on my recently cluttered schedule. But I am attempting to arrange a double bass duet of Howard Shore’s Lord of the Rings soundtrack. Naturally, I’m calling it Lord of the Strings, as a subtle metaphor for just how much more awesome basses are compared to the other orchestral string instruments. Songs featured in my medley are going to include Concerning Hobbits, of course, the main theme from the second half of The Ring Goes South, The Bridge of Khazad Dum and other tracks, maybe Rohan’s raw fiddle theme if I can get it to work on bass, and some some softer, mellower pieces as transitions and the ending. No Enya. Our orchestra in middle school player May It Be and Only Time countless time, because the teacher was obsessed with her. Sure, they’re quality songs. But no more. It’s the same reason string players don’t like Pachelbel’s Canon in D or Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. We get tired of them. Quickly.

If Lord of the Strings works out, I may try a 2 bass, 1 cello or 3 bass trio and work my up to a bass, cello, viola, violin quartet from there. I only have a basic understanding of cello fingering and difficulty and absolutely no understanding of the chinstruments’, so I’ll probably have to familiarize myself with them a bit before attempting such an undertaking.

AP Music Theory is possibly the best class I’ve ever taken. So far, it’s not very hard and there’s not much work, but I expect that to change at least a little when we get to things like tone-matching.

Anchorage Youth Symphony is pretty cool. There’s nine bassists. The other bassists’ playing vibrates your own bass’s strings almost more than your own playing. Certainly an interesting experience. The effect will be even more pronounced on stage because of the echoes.

My girlfriend, also a bassist, and I are thinking of doing a few duet performances around town. If String Club works out, that will give us a good place to practice without transporting basses around, as we have separate basses for school and home.

Airships and a techno-steampunk enthusiast’s dream

I’ve never read a bad book or seen a bad movie that has airships of any kind. Balloons are somewhat of an exception to this, but if I never get the chance to ride in a zeppelin, a simple hot-air balloon will certainly suffice.

Off the top of my head, the stories I’ve encountered recently with airships are:

• Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series – just started reading this; it’s the direct inspiration for this post
• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow - a great movie. I highly recommend it.
• Airborn and Skybreaker by Kenneth Oppel – one of my favorite children’s book authors. This series really doesn’t have an age limit, despite being considered a young-adult novel.
• Stardust - this one only sort of counts. It’s more in the fantasy genre than the rest of this list, and the airship in question is powered by lightning that can be bottled and sold. Stardust is only for the uninitiated airship enthusiast. (And, you know, anyone who thinks it’s a good movie. I thought it wasn’t bad. It imitated the Princess Bride with moderate success and didn’t get too cheesy.)

If you’re having a hard time understanding the awesomeness that is a floating ball of gas carrying passengers, watch Sky Captain. If that doesn’t do it, read either of those series. If you still need persuading, here’s a few reasons airships are the best currently as-yet-invented mode of transportation:

• Is not hovering essentially geosynchronous orbit? Airships provide geosynchronous orbit in your backyard… providing your backyard is large enough to support the immense volume of an airship. Sure, that’s nothing new, but you must admit, it does sound cool.
• Incredibly low fuel costs. Barring leaks and other issues that force you to blow up (not in the Hindenburg sense) your tank of lighter-than-air gas, I would estimate that airships have a small fraction of the transportation costs that your average liquid-employing ship. Bare in mind, that is an estimate. My purpose here is not to compare and contrast the various benefits of different traveling vessels but to merely generate airship fandom.
• How about luxury air cruises with much better views than the current brand of oversized ocean liners and no restriction to coastal ports?
• Or gigantic mobile homes? The current largest RVs are the size of a semi. With airships, the only limits are your wallet and the FAA.

The best (and hopefully eventual) effects of an airship excited populous are much more radical than one would imagine. First, let’s talk about property.

Currently, when someone buys a piece of land, that’s exactly what you’re doing. You’re buying the land. Your property is measured two-dimensionally even though what you actually own is 3-dimensional. There may be local laws on how high or deep you’re allowed to build, but it’s pretty much yours from the core to the upper atmosphere. I suppose neither of those extremes have been tested, but hopefully it won’t come to that before airships dominate the world.

The possibility of airships, or more generally anything that can hover without moving, means that property can be bought and sold in three dimensions. Instead of buying area, you buy volume. The concept of air rights is a relatively primitive example of what is to come.

Right now, all of humanity lives on a coast. Not a land-ocean coast, but a land-sky coast. We’ve begun to spread to the ocean, but there’s no talk of living in the sky (or, while we’re at it, underground). Not because it’s not feasible, but most likely because it’s unimaginable and not visibly necessary yet. But with the world’s population exploding, we need somewhere to branch out to. In my more optimistic fantasies, I envision a sky filled with a horizon-to-horizon grid of floating homes and businesses, complete with a steady bustle of traffic across footbridges and on mini commuter balloons.

The possibility for disaster in a society like that is, of course, much higher. Tragedies like a child falling off the edge would need to be accounted for, and the incredible safety required for a hovering city will no doubt put a temporary damper on humanity’s expansion into the sky. Hopefully the transition is smooth, and there isn’t another Hindenburg-esque incident that pauses airship development for another century.

Right now, the situation seems to be going well. Hybrid airships are such as the Aeroscraft (no, this is not an ad for Aeroscraft) are beginning to enter the minds of the general public as a workable alternative to airplanes, cars, boats, trains, and other forms of mass transportation. With enough development, there’s no reason airships shouldn’t be as common a sight in the sky as airplanes.

23.4

The number of degrees that the Earth is tilted. The number separating us from nonseasonal perfection. If only it had been evolutionarily beneficial for humans to migrate to the equator.

Summer is too hot. Winter is too cold. A perpetual spring would be ideal, no? Plant-life would flourish, meaning trees of Elven proportions and with some luck, plants with brains, but that’s pushing it.

If I ever write a novel, it will include the eventual achievement of the removal of Earth’s seasons, probably not a major role, maybe something that Humanity achieved in the years leading up to the story or just as a cameo, contemplating the viability of such a feat and how long it would take. But focusing on all the potential effects or even the possible destruction of the ecosystem too much for me. That kind of speculation is out of my league.

More free music!

Dance music this time. There’s some trance, some goa, some hardcore, even some eurobeat.

http://thepiratebay.org/tor/4234734

It’s only in 192kbps, because I don’t have the originals of some, and I didn’t have good enough hardware for the quality to matter then.

In other news, I’ve changed my name yet again. np was too short and impossible to search for. I’ll be going by nthnl for continuity with this blog and other things. In light of this, here’s an updated torrent of Mechanical Fingers with the correct tags. The other one’s still up, but I’ll take it down soon.

http://thepiratebay.org/tor/4234739

If you have the original Mechanical Fingers, I suggest you change the artist, album artist, and composer fields to nthnl, or just download the newer files and help seed the torrent while you’re at it.

—

Stick with me for a little bit; my upload is going pretty slow. Once some other people get seeding, it should be fine.

Mechanical Fingers torrent. Yay, free music.

http://thepiratebay.org/tor/4234739/nthnl_-_Mechanical_Fingers_(2008)

I’m not sure what to call this. It’s not an album, and I don’t want to call it an EP, because I like to think of it as being a singular work, not a conglomeration of songs that maybe shouldn’t be on the same disc. Perhaps an opus. Opus… 9? It’s NP009, but some of those are albums. I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter, I suppose. Why stay within the bounds of either popular or classical music terminology? They certainly aren’t the only two choices. Trent Reznor has his ‘Halo’ numbers, and I thought about doing something like that a while back but failed to come up with a sufficiently awesome word. So I guess I’ll stick with release.

Discography, electronic

For referential purposes. The NP*** numbers are sort of catalog numbers, but of course I’m not a record label, so they’re really just for organizing my music better than ‘Album by Year’ in iTunes.

A = Album; S – Short; R = Release

1. Soundtrack (NP004-A04) – 2006
2. Visualize (NP005-A05) – 2007
3. Fire (NP006-S01) – 2005 to 2008
4. Eargasmia (NP008-A06) – 2008
5. Mechanical Fingers (NP009-R01) – 2008
6. Visual Sound (NP010-S03) – 2006 to 2007
7. Aural Sights (NP011-S04) – 2007 to 2008
8. Eargasmix (NP012-S05) – 2008
9. Breathing Room (NP013-S06) – 2008
10. Charge (NP014-S07) – 2008

C = Compilation

1. Waves (NPC01) – 2008: NP010, NP006, NP011
2. nthnl I-III (NPC02) – 2008: NP012, NP013, NP014

NP001 through NP003 (Horizontigo, Monkeys with Basses, Meteoroids) were before I started composing. They were primarily made with loops in Garageband. They’re not available for download, partly because they’re not very good. But while the loops are public domain, they were not created by me, so I don’t consider those songs to be worthy of being distributed as my own. NP007 was for one person only and is also not available. :) Fire is four songs, one of which was my first non-loop song. The next three are variations of it, one each year from 05 to 08. I still feel like it’s not complete, so I may try to make a new version of Glow with corrected timing and/or add one or two songs to the mix.

Complete tracklistings in reverse chronological order (compilations at the bottom):

Charge (NP014-S07) – 2008

1. See NPC02 below.

Breathing Room (NP013-S06) – 2008

1. See NPC02 below.

Eargasmix (NP012-S05) – 2008

1. See NPC02 below.

Aural Sights (NP011-S04) – 2008

1. See NPC01 below.

Visual Sound (NP010-S03) – 2008

1. See NPC01 below.

Mechanical Fingers (NP009-R01) – 2008

1. Solid Liquid (6:59)
2. Internal Combustion (3:03)
3. Steampunk (1:35)
4. 8-Bit Engineering (0:42)
5. Hyperspacial (4:01)
6. Polygonal Photonic Absence (2:45)

Total time, 19:02.

Eargasmia (NP008-A06) – 2008: compilation of my more trancey songs

1. Switch (0:46)
2. Charging (3:49)
3. Hyperventilation (5:05)
4. Eargasmia (9:45)
5. Eanese (2:59)
6. Breathing Room (6:25)
7. Charged (4:32)
8. Breathing Room [Edit] (4:26)
9. Backlit Black (4:18)
10. Breathing Room [Rework] (4:26)
11. Nine Thirty (3:56)

Total time, 50:22.

Fire (NP006-S01) – 2008

1. Glow (2:43)
2. Embers (3:10)
3. Flame (4:58)
4. Extinguish (5:28)

Total time, 16:18.

Visualize (NP005-A05) – 2007

1. Nine Thirty (3:56)
2. Visualize (4:27)
3. Backlit Black (4:18)
4. Charge (4:32)
5. Breathing Room (4:26)
6. Controlled Origins (5:27)
7. Simple [Remix, original by uberkultur] (3:39)
8. Chocolate Rain [Remix, original by Tay Zonday] (3:57)
9. Neutrality (6:38)

Total time, 41:19.

Soundtrack (NP004-A04) – 2006

1. Intro + Soundtrack (3:21)
2. Alone (3:02)
3. Du Hast [Cover, original by Rammstein] (3:53)
4. Eanese (2:59)
5. Californication [Cover, original by Red Hot Chili Peppers] (4:22)
6. Artificially Unintelligent (2:27)
7. Frequency (4:56)
8. Break (3:45)
9. Virus (2:52)
10. Puzzle (2:40)
11. Animal I Have Become [Cover, original by Three Days Grace] (4:42)
12. Hypochondria (3:32)

Total time, 42:25.

Compilations

nthnl I-III (NPC02) – 2008

Eargasmix

1. Eanese (Original Mix)
2. Eargasmia (Original Mix)
3. Nine Thirty (Rework)

Breathing Room

1. Breathing Room (Edit)
2. Hyperventilation (BR Remix)
3. Breathing Room (Rework)
4. Breathing Room (Original Mix)

Charge

1. Charging (Original Mix)
2. Charged (Original Mix)
3. Controlled Origins (Original Mix)

Total time, 50:46.

Waves (NP010, NP006, NP011) – 2008

Visual Sound

1. Intro + Soundtrack
2. Break
3. Simple [uberkultur]
4. Backlit Black
5. Controlled Origins

Fire

1. Glow
2. Embers
3. Flame
4. Extinguish

Aural Sights

1. Neutrality
2. Visualize
3. Chocolate Rain [Tay Zonday]
4. Hypochondria

Total time, 49:53.

 

This list will be updated when anything new is released. I might add links to downloadable versions of individual songs if I get around to it, but it would take quite a lot of time and effort to make that functional. Album torrents will suffice for now.

Music

Music. Music music music. Music. There is simply nothing better. Even the most aurally uninclined can appreciate the awesomeness that is an uplifting chord progression after a sullen, darkly themed intro. Just imagining it is inspiring for composer types.

Being deaf must be absolutely horrid. Well, horrid for those that once had ears. For the ones that never had ears, I suppose it would be equally as horrid as it is for me to mourn my lack of six-dimensional eyes. I mean, that would be quite possibly the most awesome thing ever, topped only by seven- or eight-dimensional eyes, but I can happily live without such luxuries for the time being.

Nevertheless, music is great. My own music included, of course… so I shall indulge my most valued readership, however incredibly small it may currently be, to an exclusive sample of my relatively untapped genius.

np – Solid Liquid

Track 1 from my latest album, EP, work, opus, release, or whatever you will; the complete tracklisting of Mechanical Fingers is as follows:

1. Solid Liquid
2. Internal Combustion
3. Steampunk
4. 8-Bit Engineering
5. Hyperspacial
6. Polygonal Photonic Absence

See a pattern? A torrent of the whole thing will be available soon.