There is not much to say about my sixth electronic album, Title Case, other than it follows in the musical footsteps of the fifth album, lowercase. Long gone are the Wild West days of ADME—the randomized MATLAB synths, crude 909 beats, and unmixed audio tracks. I promise to return one day as I am rebuilding the Any Data Modulation Engine in a coding language yet to be decided. But for now, I am more comfortable making minimalist ambient music and still learning a great deal.
The biggest challenge for Title Case was to record the nine tracks as a gapless album, 45 minutes of continuous mix produced in one Cubase project. I took the concept album part one step further and decided to make the first track one minute long, the second two minutes long, the third three minutes, and so on—just to celebrate that the sum of i = 1 to 9 equals 45, which was exactly the duration of both previous albums, which also held nine tracks each. As if this was not restrictive enough, I focused on one musical interval per song, successively using unison, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, octave, and ninth.
Tracklist
01 ⋅ Trial And Error ⋅ 1:00
02 ⋅ Inspired ⋅ 2:00
03 ⋅ Tonal Music ⋅ 3:00
04 ⋅ Lacks ⋅ 4:00
05 ⋅ Every Intention ⋅ 5:00
06 ⋅ Considering That ⋅ 6:00
07 ⋅ Artists ⋅ 7:00
08 ⋅ Stultify ⋅ 8:00
09 ⋅ Especially Critics ⋅ 9:00
Naturally, I made the nine tracks in chronological order after coming up with an almost coherent sentence for the track titles: “Trial and error inspired tonal music lacks every intention, considering that artists stultify especially critics.” You may interpret it however you want, but the gist is something like “do not read too much into what the artist meant.” Quite literally! Of course, the track titles’ acronym forms the album title. I was not kidding when I said that I will follow through with this concept for all upcoming albums.
Again, I used the software synthesizer Serum by Xfer Records, mostly creating my own presets. Towards the end of production, I felt like I could not come up with one more original sound without repeating myself. This also happened during the last album until I overcame my “musician’s block”. Only this time, I allowed myself to briefly use a second synthesizer, Retrologue by Steinberg, for one particular solo track. During the last track, I was surprised to have found something that sounded like “ASMR throat @%#&”. Synthesizing sounds that resemble real world noises always motivates me. Now, I suppose I could keep on using Serum for most of the next album.
As usual, the indispensable Lars-Ole Kremer maxed and mistered the entire album—in record time and for a generous discount that only best friends and customers № 1 receive. By now, I pay little attention to my own mixing because I know Ole will fix it “in post.” With him, few songs ever need a second revision as I am at least business fluent in the language of music production, whereas Ole is a native speaker. The continuity of the album both simplified and complicated things this time. For a start, Ole—just like me—could work in a single project for the mix and master of the entire album, so EQs could be reused and loading times avoided. Secondly, the continuity made splitting into individual tracks more difficult due to the strict song durations. Thirdly, I handed him 40 individual sound files, each with a time stamp, which Ole needed to arrange correctly. That being said, it worked surprisingly well.
The making of the album artworkwas a bit different this time. By now, I settled on creating a grayscale image of leafless trees with Stable Diffusion, which is then edited with various methods. However, this time I disliked what I had made in GIMP and made a second version. For this, I threw the first version and various other trees into JunkBlender, a visual algorithm of mine that mixes multiple images into one. As always, I decided against writing the artist or album name on the cover. I like concepts and series, so the next albums and artworks will probably be made in a similar style.
It has been a productive year, making three albums in total despite raising a toddler, moving into a new abode, and playing the hell out of Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord. As a final note, here are all 21 audio track names in alphabetical order. If you are up for the task, feel free to reassign them to their respective sounds from the album: Bare Snare, Be Half, Be Quarter, Be Whole, Brush Diss, Bubakke, Dying Breeze, Fuktig Dator, Hell Bläser, Kick Off The Bridge, Mouth Sounds, Organ Donator, Pay The Bells, Pingu Pongo, Sicko Kicko, Solid Kick, Speckles, Trimmer, Vowl Coder, Waiting Too, Zwo Takter.
Like all my experimental albums, you can find Title Case on Bandcamp.
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