Music

Try out the brand new Flash mp3 player! This is based on an open source Flash player from Mike Goia, heavily modified to fit my needs. Let me know if you find any bugs with it.

About a month ago I was at a friend's house for an evening get together, and there I was treated to the spiritual mysticism that is Sam's language. Sam is a tall, hairy man with interesting views on life. He told me that night "I feel that alcohol takes me farther from God, and weed brings me closer to God, you know what I mean?"

I though it was just such an amazing statement that I had to write a song about it. So I did.

Recorded with two different banks of an Absynth VST. I sat down and played this through in one take, and it turned out rather well. Short and sweet.

Underlord was the first song that I ever released publicly. My aim was to create a mellow drum and string piece that flowed, and that was relaxing. Being the first song where I actually wrote my own loops, I thought it came out rather well. I was and still am very proud of this creation. (You can also find this song on www.acidplanet.com under my DJ name, AR-Raven, and you can drop a review of you want).

In fall of my senior year our class was reading Hamlet, and we were discussing the idea of purgatory. There was an extra credit assignment to create you're own interpretation of the terrible beyond. So I took the challenge and wrote this song, dedicated to the mind of a man forced to go through the stages of purgatory, from realization to a sweet, gentle insanity..

Hello World is a representation of a transitional period in my life; one where I was forced away from my societal norm and into a world I had no choice but to face. This song is kind of designed to make you angry at things.

Music is a very visual process for me. Most of my pieces start off with imagery that I hear music playing along with and representing. For this piece I see a girl who is confined to her apartment. Bright sunlight is filtering in through the windows, hitting dust particles in the air, reflecting off the wooden floor. She is trapped but dancing around, sometimes intruiging, sometimes dissapointing, but always exploring.

I sat quitely at my computer thinking about my girlfriend while talking to her online. I turned my chair to my Yamaha keyboard and just instantly slammed out a melody. I liked it so much that I turned it into a full song about three minutes later.

This was recorded for our English project, which is a very open-ended assignment, where we can do whatever we want with the topic "beauty." Here's some small excerpts from the paper I turned in with the assignment: "What a shallow and simple creature I am to think that I can create something beautiful. I'm sure that you'll receive many projects that try to explain what beauty is, in so many articulate words, or in images. As for me, I wanted to create something beautiful. I used no sheet music, I didn't prepare in any way. It's not edited. My idea of beauty is something that can't be put into words, not even in a five page paper. Therefore, my idea of beauty is a piano and its sound. It's something I can easily get lost in. For instance, when I sat down and started playing, I thought I had only played for three minutes, tops. I only stopped playing because the phone rang, actually, which is why the ending is rather abrupt. When I returned, I was amazed to see twelve minutes of music. It passed by in a second for me. And when I listened to it, it didn't feel like twelve minutes, it felt like a second. Time, and the laws of physics, do not apply to beauty.

I composed this for a student film during my freshman year of college. The whole process was actually a bit rushed, because this and the next piece were both created in the same day (the day before the film was due, which was the only time the video editing was completed). This piece is played during a hunt / takedown scene, and is designed to build suspense, enhance the action, and finally apex during the actual assasination.

This piece was composed for the climactic scene of the student film mentioned above. Again, it is meant to create tension, which is finally released in a happy ending.

(This song can also be found in the Animation section of this website). During my freshman year at RIT, one of my assignments in a Flash animation class was to create an animation using entirely letters and characters to make other shapes. The other arbitrary requirement was that we had to represent a season. I chose Spring, and decided to compose the music for the animation myself. This is the result, which I cherish greatly.

This one I'm really proud of. In the winter of 2006-2007 I scored a student animation in the style of the "Fairly Oddparents." The (sole) animator and I worked together for a few weeks making the final product. This is the first time I've ever composed for something this big, and there were a lot of new hurdles to conquer. Animation scores need to be synced up with, and enhance, all of the action. It was quite a challenge, but a lot of fun and a great experience. You can view the finished animation here (18MB download) or you can watch the video on YouTube at this address: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-ViLTPkypI.

Fervesco means to begin to boil in Latin. This is one of the songs that you aren't allowed to not hear. I wrote it entirely from 8-Pack loops, but many people say that this is my best song. I set out writing Fervesco for someone, for a purpose, but somewhere in the mechanics the meaning was lost, and the tune is just an emotional song now. Even though it's all loops, they're put to very good use...

I worked non-stop on Thisis for quite a long time; roughly three weeks. And by non-stop, I mean get home from school at 2:30 PM, put on the headphones, then work until three in the morning. For three weeks. I've poured my entire life into this song over a long period of time. The name "Thisis" comes from when I started working on the song. I instantly knew that "This is it," but Thisisit was too clunky of a title. So I shortened it to the beautiful "Thisis." I wrote it for someone who never wrote back.