Wednesday, February 11, 2009

RPM Challenge Mark II

I decided, after skipping a year, to undertake the RPM Challenge for the second time this year, the annual internet based project inviting musicians and bands to complete a full album from scratch in one month. I posted about my first time around with the project here and here.

There are still copies of this album extant if you feel you have the moral strength of character to endure it. In the latter post there I linked to my music submissions page on Metafilter: there's a little player box at the top of the list of posts. The songs Defeat, Eccentric, Only Civilization and Heat are all from my first RPM album, but I warn you, they aren't exactly pleasant to listen to, created as they were by a method that guaranteed results in terms of getting tracks recorded, but only by sheer stubbornness. The music is being generated more or less randomly by a computer and I am singing to it more or less without rehearsal. Rough stuff. I liked the lyrics I wrote for it, though, I feel like several of them deserve better music. So far this month the writing is going so so, I keep hoping something will gel. But as before, I'll get something down that satisfies the conditions of the challenge, come hell or high water. Honestly if hell or high water actually came I would probably just chuck it.

My RPM profile page is here, its got the archive stuff from 2007 too. I'm going to try to coax slightly more tuneful accompaniment from my newly acquired KORG DS-10 synth emulator. There's an audio file of me dinking around with that on the RPM profile page. If you're not partial to dentist drills you may want to skip the last 30 seconds or so. There is also a half-assed blogging tool because I totally need another venue to explicate the contents of my navel in textual form. With 16 days left to go we'll see how it all pans out.

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