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Forewarning: this will be a bit of a long one. So grab a drink, go pee, and get some headphones. This is my history as a musician.
There'll be links to samples throughout. All of these are Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0. They're listed in the format [album] - [song] ([year]).
I've written a few hundred songs in my life, easily, so I likely missed some things here. Oh well, it's long enough as it is ^_^
I'm only kinda sorta trained in music. As a little kid, I loved playing the electric organ we had upstairs. I didn't really know how to truly read music, but the song books that we had for the organ were meant for beginners, and so they had the note names printed inside each note. The organ itself also had the notes printed above the keys, and so it was kinda "music by numbers", but with western musical notation's note names. Between that and, eventually, learning the basics of music in elementary school, I started to build an interest in playing music.
Years later, in middle school (so ages 11-14), I took band class and started to learn to play the clarinet. Band was one of my favorite class, and music in general was already becoming super important to me, so I was one of those students who paid a LOT of attention to what we were learning. Don't get me wrong, I kinda sucked at playing, but I excelled at the musical theory parts of the class, and I loved just learning about and playing music.
This continued into high school, where I soon transitioned from clarinet to keyboard. That transition came about because of changes in my personal life at home. My mom had given me a synthesizer for Christmas (a Casio CTK-601, I still remember it lol), and I became enamored with it. She also bought me Cakewalk Home Studio, which came with a MIDI cable to connect my new synth to my computer. I would spend *hours* listening to General MIDI files this way, watching the notes on screen (Cakewalk had a traditional staff view as an option, which is what I preferred), and also learning to play along with them. This interest in synthesizers and keyboards is where the transition in band class started, and my teacher surprisingly let me switch. I say "surprisingly" because I was in Concert Band, which played orchestral music (but without string instruments), and it didn't include piano in its pieces. Instead, he would give me the trombone parts, then let me play those using a String Ensemble patch on my synthesizer. This is how my first two years of high school went.
These first two years were also when I first started to write my own music - unintentionally. It was an afternoon after school, and I was downstairs at my computer, bored and looking for something to do. Eventually I opened up Cakewalk and decided to just start putting down notes. I don't remember my exact intention, only that it was out of boredom and a curiosity of what I could get out of my synth. Before I knew it, I had a song - and it, somehow, wasn't terrible! I also didn't have a way to save it to MIDI (because my version of Cakewalk was a "demo" or something), so I grabbed a tape recorder and saved it. Eventually, once I did have a full version of Cakewalk, I re-transcribed it to MIDI[1]. I also started writing more music, thinking "Hey, I could make an album!" And thus my first music project was born: IkeTech[2]. The spark had been lit.
My first few albums were fun, but very amateur. Most of the progressions were based on a classic blues progression (1-5-1-7-5-1), which was cool and something I took from the soundtracks for Doom and Doom II[3]. But the majority of these early songs were also *extremely* repetitive because of how I did this progression. Rather than doing the normal bit where a single section used that progression, I would write a section with its own chord sequence, then _shift the entire section_ up and down semitones. The result were songs that were definitely not blues, but their macro structures were built on shifting the entire sections the same amount of semitones as a blues progression. Odd to be sure, and it was something that I never was happy with, but it worked, and so I just kept doing it.
There were also a I wrote at this time that I was proud of. This one in particular I loved at first and considered it one of my best songs up to that point. Something about the aesthetic of the choir and the bass felt like you were flying through clouds. Later I came to hate this song because it was the one my mom *ALWAYS* requested. I guess I learned early how pros feel when they get the same song requested over and over.
The last two years of high school, I transitioned to Jazz Band and also switched to playing actual piano parts. I wasn't good at piano (I've never been trained to play one), but I was good enough for class. Jazz Band was actually my favorite, what with the soloing and the improvisation, and it slowly started to show in my music. and my theory skills were still improving dramatically. A few songs were experiments with improvisation, turning whole pieces into multiple sections of just me improvising a melody and seeing where it went. Then the last section would be a reprise of the first. This worked surprisingly well, and was basically my first attempts at breaking out of the repetitive mold I had built for myself.
A year or two later, I would finally get an upgraded synthesizer that wasn't a beginner synth (a Roland JV-1010, which I still own). With new sounds came all sorts of new experimentation and playfulness. I also wrote an anomalously good song (relatively speaking) at the time called "Murasaki Awai". This was an incorrect translation of "purple light" to Japanese. The only recording I have has some pops and clicks, so excuse the audio quality, but you can definitely start seeing the jazz influence.
University time came soon after and I stopped playing an instrument in class. I did, however, take a few classes on music history and theory to continue to brush up on my knowledge of how music "works". This was also the time I got introduced to Kraftwerk, which was one of the four bands that forever changed my music. I was also learning more about metal, industrial (which I had been interested in for a while), trance, and a bunch of other stuff, all aided by a friendship I started with a dude at a nearby record store. A few more albums came out at this time (I seriously put one out[4] once a year, or twice a year sometimes), but nothing was very stand-out with them. At least until I took my trip to Japan in 2004, that is. A friend introduced me to a piece of software called Reason, and it was there that I discovered how to properly program virtual analog/digital synths, and I started work on my final IkeTech album. And I loved it. I had finally shed that repetitive ditch that I had been stuck in for years.
As I mentioned, I was getting deeper into trance and industrial music. My sound had grown more complex, harsher, and more mechanical, and so it didn't really feel like "IkeTech" anymore. I guess my long-repressed rivet head and goth side were starting to show through the cracks.
Plus the name "IkeTech" was, to put it bluntly, stupid. Too childish, and it felt too disconnected with where I wanted to take my music. To chose a new name for myself, I took two aspects of my music that were important: they were made 100% on a computer, and they were starting to inch into industrial territory. I already knew that naming an industrial band with a name and a number was a bit of a meme (Front 242, Bigod 20, Colbalt 60), so I decided to do the same. First I started going through computer terms that sounded "cool", something slightly edgy but not too much. "Partition" seemed good. From there I just tried some random numbers until I found one that flowed well off the tongue. This is how "Partition 36" started.
For my first album, I continued using Reason as a software synth and DAW package, something I wasn't happy with (I never truly liked Reason), but it was all I had at the time. The first album still had bits of that old IkeTech styling in places, but you could tell it was evolving. I was experimenting with trance-inspired songs with a club-style intro: a long drum intro to help DJs get the beats lined up, crazy sawtooth leads, and a generally longer play time.
Heck of an album name, right? It's actually a dual reference, first to a thing in Common Lisp programming (and other languages) called a REPL. This stands for "Read, Evaluate, Print, Loop", and is generally how the interactive mode works. The second reference is to a *very* obscure Detroit techno song called Generate, Display, Dump, Repeat by Simex.
Anyway, it wasn't the best album, but it was a start. I had felt freed from my old IkeTech shackles, with room to spread my wings and further develop a harsher that sound that I so desperately wanted. Maybe, in hindsight, this desire to develop a harsher sound was a reflection of my social life. Breakups, social isolation, and depression were all starting to develop in me due to both school and work. I'm sure some of that was reflected.
After this I once again upgraded my software studio, moving to Cakewalk Sonar, and an array of new virtual synthesizers (plus my old JV-1010 as a backup and filler). And this, I feel, is where Partition 36 actually became "Partition 36".
The next album's name was, once again, a reference to Common Lisp programming. In fact the album cover included fake Common Lisp pseudocode that described an AI program that would generate music, a callback to Kraftwerk and their idea of being "music workers" that just controlled the machines, which made the actual music.
The album saw a mix of styles, all much more concrete in their execution. You had video game and demoscene sounds, trance, futurepop, and also my first attempts at trippy goa trance. Maybe even a bunch of ambient if you want to stretch things.
The song "Future-Ist (Type B Mix)" was later released[5] on my first single, titled "Opposing Worlds". This song (especially it's original "Type A Mix") was heavily influenced by the VNV Nation song "Honour", which I absolutely *loved* at the time. In fact, VNV Nation was quickly becoming the next of the three bands that had a very deep influence on me.
VNV Nation was how I eventually worked up the courage to "be myself" and start dressing in a goth-ier and rivet head way. Their mix of EBM/industrial and trance, called futurepop, was a very large influence to me at the time.
Also on the album was some of my very first vocal work. If you hadn't noticed, I don't sing or even speak on any of these songs. It's not for lack of skill, but just shyness. But I needed some spoken words for one of my song ideas that dealt with the not-actually-encryption scheme ROT13[6]. This was also where my industrial leanings were really starting to come of age. The drums were a bit harsher, the bassline rough, and the vocals lo-fi, all while a buzzy melody and pingy arpeggios played on top of them. A remix that was even more industrial sounding later appeared on my first EP, "Opcode-1".
(the original "ROT13" had a song before it lead into it, so that's why it starts suddenly)
It was also around this time that I realized that making singles and EPs was fun as heck. They needed less work, and I could be more agile with switching between subjects and ideas. The first I made at the time was "Opcode-1", an EP with two songs with similar names, and a few calls back to my IkeTech days. The opening song, "Space Train", was actually one of my favorites at the time, but many people found it boring and repetitive. Maybe it was the sudden switch in influences, with it being somewhat influenced by Boards of Canada. Or maybe it was because I now owned a real hardware analog synth (a PolyEvolver Keyboard[5] that I bought halfway through "(incf-partition-36)") and the song was me learning to play with it.
Being 2008-2009, this was when my mental issues were really starting to take form, almost exclusively because of my work environment. One particular thing of note was my boss and how he kinda influenced my music. When we first met, I had mentioned in passing that I wrote electronic music, which he thought was kinda cool since he was learning to play guitar. Later on came an exchange where he was surprised to find that I actually knew true music theory and wasn't (as he suspected) some young kid programming soulless repetitive bleeps into my computer. Maybe that was the real start to the problems with him... I had accidentally showed him up on a hobby he was passionate about, and he didn't like it. Either way, it only made me want to be more musically complex to show him just how good of a musician I could be.
The other thing I released in 2009 was a single called "I Love Penguins - The Remixes". While making "Opcode-1", I had come up with this song about Linux of all things that was meant to be sort of evangelizing for the OS, the name referencing Tux, the logo for Linux. For it, I used voice samples from a Creative Commons licensed podcast I had found, something I would later repeat many times in later songs. The tune is catchy, and I remixed it into several versions, including an industrial influenced remix and a classic electro-inspired remix (which used yet another new hardware synth I had bought, a Nord Rack).
As I mentioned, I was determined to be more musically complex thanks to some snide remarks by my boss, and it was on my next album that I really pushed this complexity and musicianship. It's also where I really started to push my mixing and mastering skills, to the point that they became as important artistically as my composition.
"Inside the Beat" is an interesting beast. Parts of it still had that old Jazz Band influence, especially the second track, "Crystallis", which was essentially written by me just improvising on my synth one day. The melody hearkened back to my IkeTech days, with it expressing a youth-filled simpleness, while the underlying beat and bass were more indicative of my newer industrial-influenced style from listening to so much VNV Nation. It wasn's true industrial, but sorta industrial-influenced. I also had a hell of a time mixing this song, but I think it paid off. It was preceded by a small intro piece called "IPL", which stood for "Initial Program Load" and was a reference to old mainframe computers. I always loved the synthesized voice in that intro track...
The title track was my first attempt at writing actual real lyrics. I honestly don't remember what the song is even actually about, just that there's an over-arching idea that music is in my veins and makes me happy. I have never been happy with this song's vocals, and not just because of my male voice. As such, you can just listen to it by downloading the album (see the end).
Another track of note was "Cyberpunks", one of my favorite songs I've ever written. By 2010, I had really started to try and figure out my political stances, and one of the things that influenced me were movements like open source and cypherpunks. I didn't like our government and didn't trust it, that the everyday person is where the real power lay dormant in our world, and that technology was a key to the future. So when I found a text called The Cyberpunk Manifesto, I just had to make a song built around it. The droning bass (courtesy of a custom patch on my PolyEvolver) is just heaven to my ears. So are the high hats, which I spent extra time programming so that they would have that stereo ping-pong-meets-flying-through-the-air feel. I can't remember exactly how I did this, but I probably used an autopan effect together with a filter and some delay trickery.
And then there's those vocoded voices! I've always loved vocoders, and it was around this time that I realized I could use one and feel better about my voice. All of the vocals (the vocoded bits and the spoken-word in the middle) are me, just processed to sound better to my dysphoria-averse ears.
The Anti-System Mix was me taking the song and turning it into a club-style song. Something more dance-oriented and trance inspired. In the process, I extended the spoken word part in the middle.
2010 is also the year I had started to seriously question my gender. Halfway through the year, my egg had started to crack, first a tiny bit with an AMA on a web forum, and then with a full cracking of my egg with Alstroemeria Record's remix of "Bad Apple!!". Yep, Touhou Project turned me into a girl. Anyway, these were my first steps into the world of being transgender, and as such I hadn't totally learned the proper terminology yet. The term "trap" was being used in some locations, especially in reference to a few amateur porn stars I liked such as Bailey Jay. I hadn't yet learned that this was a slur, and was also wanting to subtly express the feelings of gender I was feeling, and so I named a song "Traps" (the content had nothing to do with it, it's just a fun break beat song with some funky effects).
This was soon followed by a remix that was HEAVILY influenced by the Odd Nosdam remix of the Boards of Canada's song "Dayvan Cowboy". This remix took a downtempo song and turned it into this crazy emotional ambient experience that I just loved. Since "Traps" had been influenced partially by Boards of Canada, it seemed logical to me to attempt a similar remix of it. The result was "Traps (Etherial Mix)", a deep and brooding downtemp track with buzzy textures and strange echoes. The drums were of note because I had created an effect module in Reaktor that was something akin to a bit crusher, but not quite. Passing the sounds through this is how I provided the remix with its unique, lo-fi drum track. This also remains one of my favorite songs that I've written.
The following year I transitioned, and in the process learned that "trap" was indeed a slur. To fix this, I renamed these songs "Trapped", which still fit because in 2010 I was trapped in the closet. So the official names are "Trapped" and "Trapped (Etherial Mix)".
2011 was a wild ride for me. It was the year I finally came out as transgender and started transitioning. As such, I didn't have quite as much time for music that year, yet still found time to release a single: The Optic Nerve.
Ooooo boy this single was fun. The title track is a hash industrial song with trippy vocal samples describing crazy metaphysical concepts. But it didn't start out this way.
It actually started with me attempting to write some lyrics that would be about a guy in a cyberpunk future that goes to a doctor to get new eye implants. Due to an office error, they unknowingly implant the wrong eyes in him. When he leaves, he starts having problems, especially with his brain receiving too much information at once. As the song would go on, it would describe him going insane and having a breakdown due to his information overload, all caused by an office mistake.
This was all inspired by a single line Skinny Puppy's song "Worlock", which had the line "Wasted views
That's all they see blue \ Hot blood guilt optic nerve \ With the right attitude \ You will succeed blue". The way he said "optic nerve" was just so cool.
Anyway... the original idea for the song never happened, though it is why the finished song is called "The Optic Nerve". I had the basic beat and sound down for it, but I just didn't have the skills to write the lyrics, let alone sing/speak them. So instead, I went a different route by taking an idea that I had previously messed with: using Creative Commons or public domain audio samples for vocals. I spent a few hours one night scouring the audio on archive.org, hoping to find something that could be fun to use in a song, and I struck gold. I forget the author's name (bad on me, I know), but the audio was of her reading something about the upcoming 2012 apocalypse that was supposedly going to happen (but obviously wouldn't since that's just silly). It fit *PERFECTLY*.
Composition wise, the song has a different tonal feel than many of my earlier songs thanks to its use of the phrygian mode as a base, as well as its heavy distortion. Coming up with a good hook to connect the verse to the chorus ended up being difficult for me, and I think I remember taking some queues from Front Line Assembly (the third band to have a huge inspiration on my music) in order to pull it off. Most of the distortion on the track was done using a waveshaper, which I've come to prefer because of the digital harshness I can get out of it. Also making a comeback was some quick vocoded samples using my voice.
I remixed this song a few times for the single, including a goa trance remix, and also included a new remix of "Cyberpunks". It remains my favorite single that I've done.
2011 was a good year. I started my transition, really started to find my identity as a woman and a goth, and was happier than ever.
Then I got pneumonia.
2012 started out fine, but quickly turned into a nightmare, one that still hasn't ended to this day. It was at the end of March that I caught a very, very bad case of bacterial pneumonia that lasted for close to a month. Numerous times I went to my doctor's office for help, but the staff there just kept sending me home with basic instructions to take over-the-counter stuff for colds. It wasn't until multiple ER visits and visits to providers outside of my insurance that I finally started to overcome it. In the aftermath, my doctor (who I hadn't been able to see this whole time) told me that I really should have been hospitalized with how serious my pneumonia was. Gee ya think? I was coughing up blood, couldn't breath, and was having mental issues with it. Nice to know in hindsight that I was closer to death than I would have liked to have been.
Anyway, the pneumonia brought with it the start of all my anxiety issues. I mean, they existed before, but they were manageable and not yet a problem. It was this pneumonia episode that pushed them all over the edge. Once they combined with the issues I had at work with my boss, it was all downhill, right up until June 30th 2013 when I got fired for missing too much time. That was when I stopped working. But that's another story.
During this 2012 period of heavy anxiety and depression, I started working on a new album. For its title, I took one of the "rules of the internet", rule 63. This is similar to rule 34 ("if it exists, there's porn of it"), but rule 63 means "if there's porn of it, there's a gender bent version of that porn somewhere" or something along those lines. Seeing as I had recently transitioned, and that 63 was 36 backwards, I named my next album "63". So yeah, it's name is a tongue-in-cheek joke.
This album is interesting for me personally because it's such a quintessential Partition 36 album. There's influences from industrial music and futurepop, Kraftwerk influences make a comeback, and strange experimentation with sound exist everywhere. Each track drips with a love of synthesizers, especially big booming ones (listening to this album in a car with subwoofers is a treat for sure). And by now I had also developed a new pattern of having a "token trance song" on every album, as well as a token "definitely industrial song". These sort of things started with "Inside the Beat", but they matured and came to fruition in "63".
The first track is actually a poem I had written either in 2011 or 2012, and is about a person realizing that their life is like standing on the edge of a knife. If they push themselves too hard in one direction, they'll fall to destruction. But if they simply "be [themself]" and go down the other side, they have a way out of the situation. Yet they keep walking across the knife, never taking the side to happiness. The poem was read by me, with a bunch of processing on my voice, and musically leads into the next track.
"Midnight Highway" is something of an homage to my favorite anime series, Bubblegum Crisis. I usually name my songs after how they "feel" in my head, and what sort of images they paint when I close my eyes. This particular song felt like someone taking a motorcycle ride on an empty highway in the middle of the night in a cyberpunk Tokyo-like city.
The next track, "Wired Jungle", is one that I hear my wife playing over and over fairly often. I can't fault her for it, either, it's one I like to listen to over and over as well. The song opens up with an odd drone, which I had created by taking a sound of a Hoover vacuum cleaner, passing it through a granular synthesis engine, then applying additional effects to get this weird sort of underwater-but-not-really sound. The pingy sounds that play on top of it throughout the song are done in Reaktor, and the choir comes from my good ol' JV-1010. This song always reminds me of Metroid Prime thanks to that choir ("Chorale", as the patch is called). The bass was (iirc) done with a virtual Prophet 5, and I remember spending hours getting its sound just right during mixing and mastering.
If I remember right, there wasn't much of a concept to this song. My head interpreted the sound of it as a sort of decayed cyberpunk ruins, where you had abandoned concrete buildings standing in the rain, with old cables hanging down everywhere.
Following this was a political song and my "token definitely industrial" song, "Occupy v1.2". Obviously inspired by the Occupy movement, it was basically me venting my frustrations by finding audio clips on archive.org that fit my thoughts and putting them into the song. And of course me with a vocoded voice going "OCCUPY!!!", as well as some spoken-word semi-lyrics that I recorded and then heavily distorted.
Musically, the chorus is actually HEAVILY influenced by Front Line Assembly's song "Mindphaser", to the point that the chord progression is almost lifted straight from it. This was my way of acknowledging them as being a huge influence on my music, and on me as a person. Plus FLA just writes the best hooks imaginable, so I had to try and use one to learn from them.
Skipping forward a few tracks lands you at the song "/dev/music", my nod back to my early college days when I was obsessed with Kraftwerk. The premise is simple: a hypothetical Linux computer with a device, /dev/music, that writes music for you. Just `cat /dev/music > /dev/dsp` and you get music. That was the idea, anyway, and probably not explained very well in the resulting "lyrics". But it's still a fun Kraftwerk-y song.
Speaking of Kraftwerk, I used the same vocoder on this that they used during their "Minimum-Maximum" era. Their method of using very low notes as the carrier proved to be perfect for this song's vocals in the second half. The non-vocoded vocals were generated using a TTS program in an Atari ST emulator.
The breakdown in the middle is not only a call back to how Kraftwerk does things, but also back to my old Jazz Band days. The difference here is that rather than doing a solo on an instrument, the "solo" is in the changing effects that are getting applied to the song.
I have specific memories of working on this song in the middle of having pneumonia. Despite that, it remains a favorite, especially for its playfulness, and how good it sounds.
The track immediately following this is probably the track I'm most proud of ever. Not because I finally created some catchy pop tune, or some deep and introspective masterpiece, but rather because it's just so experimental yet works so well. And oddly, it's one of the very VERY few songs I've ever written in a major key, like one of two or three total.
"Tweak" is a song about deconstruction. At first it sounds pretty normal, with some nice digital sounding pads, some number station sampling, and a fun beat. There's a few glitchy parts, but not many, and it just sounds like some playful effects were placed on the instruments.
But then things start falling apart. Start with the first short breakdown, the song slowly starts to get glitchier. Not in the stuttering sense, but in the sense that the machine playing it is having trouble. Rhythms slowly become more and more glitched, voices drop in and out or even play multiple notes on top of each other. This continues, with the song getting worse and worse, and even skipping part of itself at one time. Finally, by the end, it just decomposes into a bitcrushed mess of noise. The song has crashed.
Somehow, despite all this glitching, the song still "works" and is still catchy. It leads into another song, "Zaxxib", which suddenly rushes out of the bitcrushed noise and becomes normal again.
"63" was followed up by a remix album where I got some of my fellow musician friends to do remixes of the songs.
After "63" came my next album, "Waveforms". By now (2014) it was obvious that the anxiety and depression were affecting my ability to produce music, as I wasn't able to churn out songs like I used to and release something every year. My creativity was sliding, and my energy fading. Despite this, I still managed to put together an album, though with a few changes to my usual formula.
The opening song uses a poem I found on (I think) Freesound, read by someone else. I added some boomy synths, something I had since come to love, as well as a neat sounding arpeggio on top. The experience was meant to sound kinda introspective but still get you ready for a wild ride. I've always liked it just because of how good the low end sounds, and for the poem.
The next track, "The Mainframe", is just a total celebration of my love of synthesizers. That's it, just a song of sounds I love, named after the things that are so central to my life (computers). It also introduces my favorite virtual synth, the ImpOSCar. It's use at the end (3:48) gives me goosebumps with how powerful and lovely it sounds. It's just a beautiful synthesizer, as is the hardware synth it emulates.
The semi-breakdown in the middle uses a technique I learned way back in the 90s by studying what Bobby Prince did for the Doom soundtracks. In his song for E2M2, "The Demons from Adrian's Pen", he uses a technique where he progressively offsets certain drum hits to give a "spinning" sensation. I used this same sort of thing starting at 2:12.
Also of note are the drums at the start. Believe it or not, I wrote this part by listening to a LOT of Skinny Puppy, and the song was originally going to be a harsh industrial song inspired by them. All that remains is the opening bit, a rhythm inspired again by their song "Worlock", filtered to sound like it's coming out of a small speaker.
The final track of the album, "Colorado", has an interesting story. The state of Colorado (where I live) had put out these epic tourism videos that had these epic orchestral sounds. Kinda silly to be honest, but at the same time, I actually do love Colorado. It's such a beautiful state.
One day I had bought a new virtual synth called Phosphor1, which was modeled on the Alpha Syntauri card for the Apple II. I was getting some really nice warm pads out of it and just started putting them together in my DAW. Then I added some extra bass, some background arpeggios, some more pads and...
Holy crap, I just accidentally'd a song.
I had been watching those silly Colorado tourism videos earlier that day, so I guess they must have influenced me, because the song I wrote ended up having a similar epic feel. But unlike those videos, mine was fully electronic, and once again a song just screaming "holy crap I love synthesizers." As I listened to the song, I imagined some of the same visuals as those tourism videos and felt they went really well together. It was a song with a positive feel, and one that felt kinda like a beginning. So, in honor of my home state, I named it "Colorado". Listening to it still gives me goosebumps, especially when I'm up in the mountains.
"Colorado" was one of a few tracks on this album that marked my first real journeys into ambient music. Truth be told, I actually really like ambient stuff, especially dark ambient like Lustmord, but I had never really explored it in my own music.
OK, not really an acid trip. I've never done acid. But I've always loved acid house music, and ever since my early days in the 90s and early 2000s, I would occasionally try to create an acid house song. "H₂SO₄" was when I finally managed to do it properly.
The title is a play on words: the genre is definitely within the realm of oldschool "acid house", most of the spoken word samples I used were from an old video about LSD, and the name of the song is the chemical name for sulfuric acid. So yeah, acid everywhere.
Musically it's just plain old acid house, where I had a lot of fun spinning the knobs on a (virtual) TB-303 set against a TR-909 drum machine. That was something I always liked about acid house: it was kinda minimal, yet not. You could do a complete acid house song with just those two instruments, and it was all done by turning the knobs in creative ways to provide variations. Yet it's that creativity that gets to be deep and complex. Fun stuff.
Oh and the bass was a Commodore 64 SID chip.
This was the only thing I released in 2015, as a single with it and a few remixes, as well as an industrial song called "More" that I wrote for a friend's Doom level. Anxiety and depression were definitely taking their toll.
Aside from writing music, I also really like making levels for Doom. In fact, Doom was the primary reason I started writing music. As I mentioned earlier, one of the reasons I started writing was to provide original music for my Doom levels. "Shadows of The Nightmare Realm" is an EP made from such songs.
The album is exclusively dark ambient inspired stuff. It's meant to be evil sounding, brooding, creepy, all to provide atmosphere for my horror-themed level set of the same name. All the songs were fun to write, but the one I'm most fond of is "Stay". It layers the warmth of analog string synths with spooky whispered vocal samples (I forget where I got them, probably Freesound) to give you this feel of unease.
I think it was around this time that I had discovered Lustmord, because the bass line on "Stay" is directly inspired by one of his tracks. The sound was made by taking the output of a bass patch from a virtual Korg M1 played real low, then just destroying and mangling it with all sorts of effects. There's still that hint of "plink" from the original bass sound, but not much. Instead you get this horrific evil droning "bong bong bong bong" that sounds like an evil heart counting down to your death.
Yeah, if you haven't noticed, this is when my music started to get darker. This is mostly because of my anxiety and depression, which just kept getting worse.
Finally, we arrive at the most recent album I've written, "Dead Star". It's been seven years since I've written it, and part of me worries that this will end up being the last album I ever write. I really hope not.
When I said that my music had "started to get darker" with Shadows of The Nightmare Realm, I really meant it. "Dead Star" is filled with a mix of industrial and dark ambient, with just a sprinkling of less dark sounding music. It's a reflection of my post-63 and post-Waveforms self, where I went from feeling on top of the world with my music, to feeling destroyed by life. In some ways it's my favorite album of mine, yet it's also a difficult one for me to listen to because of its darkness. Well, maybe the darkness doesn't come through very well for others, but for me it does, because I remember what my life was like at the time of writing it.
I'm only going to cover a few songs of it because I highly recommend giving this one a listen in its entirety.
When I got pneumonia, I also somehow got it stuck in my mind that I had contracted rabies. There was no logical reason for this - no animal bites or anything - yet I still had it in my head that I had picked up rabies from a trash can that had been knocked over by a raccoon. So severe was my fear that I had rabies that it has since become an inside joke with me and my family. "It must be rabies" is now our standard response when we start feeling sick.
"Rabio" is the word "rabies" in Esperanto, and like the title implies, the song is about the disease. The song is kind of an end cap in my life, putting part of my anxiety-riddled self behind me. And it's just industrial as heck, with its Front Line Assembly inspired rhythms, the pulsing KMFDM inspired bass, and its slightly transgressive audio samples. I absolutely love this song.
Track six is actually a new version of my old 2005 song "Searching for My Identity". I had always loved that song, especially since I had written it while thinking about how I really had no identity at the time. Later I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, which explains those feelings I've always had. I think it was around this time that I was diagnosed with it, so I probably unconsciously revisited the song because of that.
The entire song (save for the opening pads) were reconstructed from scratch by listening to the original and painstakingly recreating it. One very important part I wanted to get right was the opening when the arpeggios first start. The original song had a mistake where I didn't place the arpeggio exactly on the first beat of the measure, and instead had it slid over by a 16th note. It's a small thing, but it was important to me, because every time I tried to "fix" it back in 2005, it made the song sound worse.
The song is also just one of my favorite pre-Partition 36 songs, and one that was (for me) ahead of its time. So bring it into the Partition 36 era felt good.
"Ĉarpentisto" is a song inspired by John Carpenter's music. By 2017, I had started listening to retrowave, and he had also put out an album two years prior called "Lost Themes" that I highly enjoyed, and which had some retrowave-ish sound to it. I had been wanting to recreate this sound for a while, and though I already had a song called "Overdrive" (which was never released on an album/ep/single), I wanted to try again to see if I couldn't get a darker, more edgy song. "Ĉarpentisto" (Esperanto for "carpenter") was the result.
Though "Dead Star" was my last album (for now 🤞), it wasn't the last pieces of music that I've written. I was still making levels for Doom and was in the process of making a followup to Shadows of The Nightmare Realm called Umbra of Fate. Like last time, I did the soundtrack for it as well. Also like last time, it was a dark, spooky, horror-filled dark ambient soundtrack.
I can't remember exactly when I started doing this (probably when I discovered Lustmord while writing Shadows of The Nightmare Realm's OST), but I found that I enjoyed taking samples and using them in a sort of "musique concrète but with more tones" sort of way. Definitely not actual musique concrète, but maybe edging ever so slightly closer as time went on, all as a way for me to explore my fragmented and somewhat chaotic mental states.
The first song on this EP has a tiny bit of that with its ticking clock sound that's ever present in the background. Within the context of the level Umbra of Fate, the ticking clock was meant to symbolize the main character's countdown to death. This is punctuated with low demonic growls (which I think were originally a recording of some lady speaking Spanish that I mangled to hell and back) and spooky quotes from a public domain Vincent Price movie and somewhere else. The overall tone is one of sadness, but not completely. There's definitely a spooky horror feel to it, but it's one that's meant to be depressing.
The third track, "Sterile Twilight", is much closer to the "musique concrète but with more tones" idea. Lots of cult-like droning choir sounds together with metal-on-stone sounds, a creepy synth, and an ever present brooding rumble that pulses in and out. Great stuff for the spooky outdoor area where I used it in Umbra of Fate.
The fourth track is my favorite one of the EP, and one I listen to quite often. At this point in the level, the player has gone deeply into a cult's temple, driven there by some unknown force controlling their subconscious. There's a slight sense of hope in the song because there's a slight sense of hope since it's the end of the level. Will the character make it out alive? Will there be a happy ending? That's reflected in the hints of positivity the song, especially at the end where a sound (a patch called "Transgender" for some synth I have, coincidentally) has the feeling of having made it out by the skin of your teeth. A feeling that you overcame the odds, crawled your way back to the surface, to the light, and now are doing the Hollywood thing of standing in rain with your arms spread, yelling because you're alive. And yet...
The final song of the album is a cover of "Gymnopedies I (Lent et douloureux)", a song originally composed by Erik Satie. He had this really neat idea of "furniture music" that ties in well with ambient, where it's music that's meant to just sorta be in the background and not consciously listened to. A friend and I had done a cover of this for another musical side project, but I wanted to do a cover of my own. Since I needed a good creepy ending song, I chose "Gymnopedies I".
Except it's not a normal recording of it. Instead, I overlay it with the buzzing of insects (because the character of Umbra of Fate is now back outside), the meowing of demonic cats, and other odd forest sounds. For the piano, I added a very odd detuning effect so that it would sound like the thing is on its last leg, slowly dying. It's somber, defeating, and it works perfectly for the ending story of the level.
So while the previous track gave you a sliver of hope, the final track ruins it. It shows you that your hope for a better life isn't going to happen. Life is tough, it isn't your friend, and it's going to laugh at you as you slowly wind down and start crying, like a broken piano on its last leg.
I didn't cover all of the music I've written, but I probably covered 95% of it. There's a few things here and there, like the side project I had going on with my friend that we called "Tree Fungus", a project where I helped out with some spoken word poetry put to music, and maybe a few other misplaced tracks. Yeah, I've written a lot of music.
Music is a strange thing for me. It's always been incredibly important to me, not just mentally but spiritually. Heck, I can't be in a car without music playing or I get uncomfortable. It's where my soul resides, and by writing music, my soul (my true soul, the one that is my true inner self) gets to peek out and wave a little flag saying, "Here I am". My music is my way of looking at myself.
My IkeTech were playful. I was having fun just writing music, churning out an album every year (sometimes twice a year), learning music theory, and learning how to not make songs so repetitive. But they're also distant memories, ones that only bring nostalgia now. My early Partition 36 years showed a slow maturation of my style, and by extension my inner self. Things were less childlike, a bit of innocence was lost, and darker tones emerged. Things were also still somewhat fluid, at least until "Inside the Beat" and "63". That's when Partition 36 found itself, when I found myself. But then the battle scars started appearing, and you could tell my music was getting darker, more brooding, and maybe even a bit angry at times. Some of this likely isn't obvious given that my songs don't really have meaningful lyrics (that's just not my style). But you can tell that by the time "Dead Star" came around, a darker view of life had merged. One that was broken, tired, and even a bit cynical. Not only was this in my music, but it was in my Doom levels. They had gotten darker with time, and the music I wrote matched that darkness.
I really hope I start writing music again soon, as I miss it terribly, but I'm not sure when (or if) that'll happen. I mean, it probably will happen, but I just hope it's sooner than later. When I do, I want both explore that darkness again, and start to explore more positive feeling things again.
So yeah. Anyway. That's been my musical journey. Hopefully it continues on this year.
All of my Partition 36 stuff can be downloaded for free, btw, and I don't just mean the samples I posted above. All of my albums and EPs, in full, can be downloaded through the link below (all CC BY-NC-SA):
The IkeTech stuff isn't up anywhere, though, and I don't really want to put it up for download. So unless you're a friend who asks for it, don't expect to hear any more than the samples above :-P
[1] No, I don't have the MIDI on hand. I think it's on an archival Bluray that I had burned a while back, which is in my storage unit. It never appeared on an album of mine, either.
[2] The name "IkeTech" (originally stylized "IkeTech!") was just a silly amalgamation of the name Ike, an alias I went by online at the time, and "Techno", a musical genre I was really getting into at the time. I do not contend it was a good name.
[3] Bobby Prince, the composer of those soundtracks, was a huge influence on me at the time. In fact, one of the reasons I started writing music was to provide music for my own Doom levels, so I looked to him (and later, Lee Jackson) for inspiration. Bobby Prince had a blues background, and that had indirectly transferred to me.
[4] By "release" I mean upload a .zip to some obscure website that no longer exists, and burn CDs for me, my mom, and my friends. These days the only difference is I upload it to a site and maybe make a YouTube video for it. Talk about indie, eh?
[5] Well, analog/digital hybrid. Two of its oscillators were traditional analog ones, and the other two were digital wavetable oscillators. From there it went into an analog filter, and an analog envelope. It was made by Dave Smith, so it sounded absolutely amazing. Selling that years later was one of the biggest single mistakes I've ever made in life, and I regret it constantly.
[6] All ROT13 does is rotate the alphabet 13 spaces. It's the encryption equivalent to printing the answers to the crossword puzzle upside down. It is not encryption, and I loved making jokes about it.
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