There is not much to say about my fifth electronic album, lowercase, other than it follows in the musical footsteps of the fourth album, UPPERCASE. Long gone are the days of randomized MATLAB synths, crude 909 beats, and unmixed audio tracks. However, despite the name, this album is not lowercase (i.e., the musical genre) because it is still not quiet enough. I promise we will get there one day.
Once again, I used only the software synthesizer Serum by Xfer Records, mostly creating my own presets. Halfway through production, I felt like I could not come up with one more original sound without repeating myself. Then, I remixed a discarded track from the previous album, made another one from only a kick drum sample, and the “musician’s block” was overcome. Now, I suppose I could even make a follow-up album with Serum without repeating myself too much.
Tracklist
01 ⋅ lest you are ⋅ 5:00
02 ⋅ only ⋅ 5:00
03 ⋅ waiting for ⋅ 6:00
04 ⋅ ending credits ⋅ 5:00
05 ⋅ retroactively ⋅ 5:00
06 ⋅ can you ⋅ 4:00
07 ⋅ appreciate ⋅ 5:00
08 ⋅ subtle ⋅ 4:00
09 ⋅ exit music ⋅ 6:00
Once again, I made the nine tracks in chronological order after coming up with an almost coherent sentence for the track titles: “Lest you are only waiting for ending credits, retroactively can you appreciate subtle exit music.” You may interpret it however you want, but the gist is something like “the journey is the goal” (or the exact opposite). Once again, the track titles’ acronym forms the album title. Be warned that I will follow through with this concept for the next few albums.
Once again, the indispensable Lars-Ole Kremer mixed and mastered the entire album—in record time and for a generous discount that only best buddies receive. My customer reference number is 1 for a reason. 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. For the master, we met in the middle because I wanted more lowercase and less K-pop. I am unsure whether the great lowercase luminaries master their albums at all or merely normalize the volume.
Once again, I created a grayscale image with Stable Diffusion, which I edited with GIMP to make the album artwork. However, this time I did not use Processing Coding Language on top but mostly relied on a built-in effect, the “Little Planet” filter. Once again, I decided against writing the artist or album name on the cover. I like concepts and series, so the next album artwork will probably be made in a similar style—as will the actual album. Rest assured, I have eight more cases/albums all planned out, enough to keep Ole busy until at least Christmas 2024.
As a final note, here are all 34 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: asswhole, bytecrusher, cardiac, cellist, chopstyx, clunkytapping, cracklite, crunge, dudenextdoor, fartbreath, fastforward, fluttershite, gongrain, gothictrain, gurgoyle, hairconditioning, hoppereiter, horozone, hypnogong, kalküle, magicpotion, meltingcheese, minuteglass, plasmacharger, reinterference, schbacke, staticrain, treppengeländer, tweeep, ubrot, vindspeal, vinylfountain, violinist, violist.
Like all my experimental albums, you can find lowercase on Bandcamp.
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