Category Archives: Audio

Sounds and music.

Rain Without End by Bloodless Mushroom

Back in 2018-2020 I published a few guitar-and-bass songs as Rain Without End. Well, I want to have fewer things to manage, so I folded the REW stuff into my main Bloodless Mushroom project and re-released the the music that people liked as an the “Rain Without End” EP by Bloodless Mushroom today.

Listen on your favorite platform here:

https://songwhip.com/bloodlessmushroom/rain-without-end

I’m Available for Hire for Music Composition on Fiverr

Do you have a movie or video game that you want original music for? I’m now available for hire on Fiverr for composition work.

Since I have decades of experience in composing, recording, and mixing original ambient and soundtrack-style, I can create something both unique and high-quality.

Sure, you could go with one of hundreds of Hans Zimmer clones, but if you want something different — something that doesn’t sound like it came from a stock music website — having me write something for you would be a very good choice.

Click here for more details about my gig on Fiverr.

MusicSrch Improvements

It’s been a long time since I’ve worked on MusicSrch.

For the past few years, I really didn’t have any time for side projects, and a few searches were very broken on the site due to changes in the various third-party websites. It needed some serious rehab.

I spent a few days fixing things and improving various features, and now it’s a lot better.

Give it a try at https://musicsrch.com

I plan to spend a lot more time working on it this year, and there are more sites I want to add to search.

New Bloodless Mushroom Release – Hydropus

I recently released some new Bloodless Mushroom music, an album titled Hydropus. It’s a collection of glitchy ambient instrumental tracks composed on various vintage synthesizers. The name comes from a genus of mushroom that grows in tropical forests.

The album art is a painting I created early in the Coronavirus lockdowns.

It’s available for listening on YouTube here:

It’s also available on Spotify and other streaming services. Enjoy. 🙂

New OJ Champagne Release – Battery Acid

I wrote a song about developing an addiction to battery acid in the pre-COVID times (2018). I performed it live a few times in Portland, Oregon. During the lockdown I recorded a version of it.

It’s available on YouTube:

It’s also available on Spotify and other streaming services.

New Dr. Kilpatient Release – Jam 453

During the COVID-19 lockdowns, Tomasz Kordowski and I had some pretty good jams in our house, The Craniorium (named for all the mannequin heads, of course).

I polished up and released a recording of my favorite one for streaming. It’s called “Jam 453” and it’s available for listening on YouTube:

It’s also on Spotify and all the other streaming services.

Of course, that’s Tomasz Kordowski on piano, and me on drums.

(Book Review) The Music Lesson by Victor Wooten

The Music Lesson by Victor Wooten

I just finished reading The Music Lesson. It was a very odd book. It’s going to take a bit to sink in.

Based on the intro, I was under the impression that it was a true story. At first that made me a bit of a skeptic, but once I realized it was a work of fiction meant to present lessons in the manner of Aesop’s Fables or a set a parables, it was much easier to enjoy.

It doesn’t say much about how to write or perform music, but it also teaches you how to learn everything you need to know about it.

It made total sense, but also didn’t. Some of the lessons are more ephemeral than others, and you’ll have to “feel” them rather than grasp them intellectually.

If you read it and think about the concepts in it and put them into practice, you will become a better musician, no matter your primary instrument. The core idea is that you should get to a state where you don’t have to think about notes or scales and music just flows through you, and each lesson is something that you’ll need to master in order to get to that point.

My Musical Hiatus 2003-2015

I didn’t release much in the way of original music from 2003 to 2015. There was just the Positronic Empire album, which is more of an EP, and the Agaritine album, which is all software-created remixes.

I was focused on other things. From 2003-2005, pretty much all of my time was focused on finishing college. After that, I spent a decade establishing myself in a career in software, going from total n00b to a manager with a team of 5. That didn’t leave much time or motivation for music.

Most of the drum beats for 2008’s Positronic Empire were written in 2005 just as I was finishing school. I dug them out a few years later and finished them during a week of vacation. In 2012, the remix album Agaritine was created using the Echo Nest Remix API (which is now called Amen).

It wasn’t until 2015, after having built one of everything software-wise and having founded multiple startups, that I got back into music in a big way. Since then I released 13 albums as Bloodless Mushroom, three as Toilet Duck Hunt, an album and an EP as OJ Champagne, and a handful of singles as Rain Without End, and an EP with Sasha and The Children, a band that I performed live with for about a year.

In the middle of the pandemic, I got burnt out on music and didn’t really have any creativity flowing. I think creativity requires new experiences, and lockdown turned the new experiences knob down to zero. I’m only just now getting back into it as things have opened back up and will probably release another album this year. I don’t know if I have much more in me after that. I’m also sensing (and planning) a new wave of major life change, which may or may not bring musical creativity along with it.

Whether I do or don’t create more music isn’t particularly important. I’ve done a lot. I’ve released more music than most professionals do in their lifetime. I doubt that I’ll be remembered for my music, but that’s OK. I’ve only ever made it for myself and for my creative enjoyment.

Gear Hoarding

I’m thinking back to the time when I bought my first piece of music gear on eBay in 2001. It was a Yamaha TX81Z FM rack synth module, fairly beat up. It had a lot of cheesy, useless-sounding patches and a few really nice ones. I had a Yamaha DJX keyboard that my mom had bought me the previous Christmas. Together, with those two pieces of gear, I wrote Forest of Worlds at the house at 4026 Westway in Toledo. I didn’t have much other gear, just a bass guitar (I think it was an Ibanez Ergodyne EDC705, but it might have been something else) and an electric guitar, a modified Peavey Predator with a multi-effect pedal. There was really nothing I couldn’t do with that gear given enough talent/skill. Which I didn’t have yet.

Before Forest of Worlds, I had never written any music using the keyboard. Sure, there was a track where the DJX was playing drum sounds on my first album, but that wasn’t keyboard music. Before that, I had only written tracker, fractal, and guitar tunes. While it opened a whole new world of synthesizer music and spawned some beautiful-to-me songs like Trepidation, Encounters, Gliding, Cosmic Serenade, Quelet, Montagne, and others (in spite of the core of Bloodless Mushroom being a mix of fractal and tracker tunes), it also created a monster. From that moment on I started hoarding gear, collecting things less because they served a useful purpose and more because I could. I wanted to have every possible sound at my fingertips. I wanted to experience and explore everything out there in the world. And I pretty much did.

While the time spent playing and practicing made me a better musician, the gear hoarding did not. In fact, it actively detracted from my musicianship. I spent too much time fiddling with gear, noodling, and just shuffling things around, and not enough time practicing and writing music. I did create the SoundProgramming website from my explorations, which has helped a lot of people explore gear and get manuals for it, so it wasn’t all wasted effort.

Now I have every sound imaginable at my fingertips. I have so much software and so many libraries that there’s nothing I can’t do electronically (my sample library is more than 600 gigabytes). Since Bloodless Mushroom was always more of a tracker-and-fractal project, I never needed anything more than a laptop to write music in the first place. I certainly don’t need a whole room full of gear. In fact, the more in-the-box I work, the more creative I seem to be.

Just give me a keyboard (with MIDI). Practically any keyboard will do, but full-size keys help. Just give me a bass guitar and regular guitar and a cord to connect them with. The make and model doesn’t even matter, as long as they stay in tune. I do not need more gear than I can carry on my back. Well, as long as I’m not playing/writing drums. A real electronic or physical kit won’t fit on my back.

Proof of this just-plug-something-in-and-go is in the Rain Without End songs. They’re really just me multitracking guitar and bass. And it sounds good. Not perfect by any means, but I can put together nice-sounding ideas that people enjoy.

I must confess that using three GM-capable synths like I did for the Gymnopus album sure does sound good, though. All that can be achieved in software like Kontakt, of course. It just requires more detail work. If I do that work, the quality will be far beyond anything I could get with a 17-year-old hardware module.

What I’m trying to say is this: I don’t need to take any of this stuff with me. I can get what I need wherever I am, and I don’t need much.

New Version of the Vorbital Player Music Player

There’s a Windows music app I’ve been maintaining off and on over the last 10 years or so. Today I released an update with some significant user interface improvements.

The idea behind the Vorbital Player is to have a simple and uncluttered interface that just plays music and audio files and doesn’t try to manage your music library.

You can get it here:

https://zetacentauri.com/software_vorbital.htm

AlgoRhythmia Now Available for OSX

AlgoRhythmia was my first “complex” desktop app. By complex I mean difficult to build and with a deep interface that could be explored and tinkered with extensively.

It’s a drum machine that can generate random beats. It can also “mutate” existing beats and cause them to change over time.

This is the windows version, but the macOS version looks identical.

It started as a Windows app. It used DirectX, a very Windows-centric audio engine. Because of this, I never tried to build a version for another operating system. Well, now I have. And it is available for OSX.

You can get it here.

DrumPads Released for OSX

DrumPads is an app with 12 virtual drum pads that lets you use the keyboard, mouse, touchscreen, or an external MIDI device to play any of 100 high-quality drum sounds.

DrumPads for Windows. Looks identical on OSX.

It started as a webOS app. It was later ported to Ubuntu and sold via the Ubuntu Store. Then ported to Windows and ended up becoming my most popular app with 330,000 downloads of the free version. I spent some time porting it to OSX a while back, but never had a version in the App Store.

Now I do.

You can get it here.

Vintage Live Dr. Kilpatient Recordings

I posted two Dr. Kilpatient live albums recorded in 2001 on YouTube.

The first is And The Key of Love, from the largest live lineup we ever head. With a larger lineup, we evolved from our industrial circus rock sound to more of an electronic funk band.

The second is Fuck Jason Champion, an album titled as a goodbye tribute to me because I was moving to New York City. I came back 4 months later. That place wasn’t my style.

Enjoy this glimpse into the history of Midwestern circus rock.

Rain Without End – Flickering Flames

I recorded and released a song called “Flickering Flames” in January. It’s an instrumental track with bass and three guitars. Here it is as a YouTube video:

The cover art is a painting I created the first time I tried abstract painting. The cover art for “Rolling Clouds” was created the same day.

If you’d rather listen on Spotify, it’s here.