[] . Vent . 1 . 2 . 3 . 4 . 5 . 6 . 7 . 8 . [][] . N . []
Vent 01: Looking Down Into The Valley of Thorns \/ \/ \/ \/
Vent 02: Calculated Time Consumption \/ \/ \/ \/
Vent 03: Collection of Lost Tracks, Remixes and Audio Collages \/ \/ \/ \/
Vent 04: The Death of it All \/ \/ \/ \/
Vent 05: Shades of Grey \/ \/ \/ \/
Vent 06: The Mario Sessions \/ \/ \/ \/
Vent 07: Sleight of Hand \/ \/ \/ \/
Vent 08: Point of Access \/ \/ \/ \/
Vent 09: Failure
Vent 10: Eyeliner
Non Vents:
Nine Inch Nails: Livid
Nine Inch Nails: Meant for Sleeping
Vent One:
Looking Down Into the Valley of Thorns (.rar archive download)
01 . the art of noise
02 . compliance
03 . static rain
04 . technetics
05 . smashed mainframe
06 . march of spite
07 . backlash
08 . headlong staircase
09 . within
10 . awakening
11 . dormant
12 . dissipate
13 . overcast
14 . frightened conclusion
15 . departure
The reason this album is named this is because it was supposed to be part one of a set of three albums. There are masses of poetry and ideas that have developed into their own beings in my head. One of which is the idea that the world I live in is a river of piss. The first record was going to be kind of a setting up of sorts, like a vulture circling over it's prey. looking down into the valley of thorns, without mentioning a barely visable river of piss from the vantage point the album is written in. such as, i see the valley of thorns, all the pain and suffering to go through. such as, when you're up above it, you can find yourself down in the mix of pain and suffering of life and you COULD always push through and end up in a river of pure piss where you get pulled to the bottom and die. From bad to worse.
The second album I was going to name THE VALLEY OF THORNS and have it detail more of the pain and suffering in my life and in my head, in as abstract a way as i could come up with. The third album was naturally going to be called The River of Piss. Enough of this side of things.
What actually ended up happening with this first album, though, is it was a very basic experimentation with sound. Backlash and a few others were done entirely in Sound Forge. I didn't like creating music in that type of digital atmosphere so I found Fruity Loops. I used Sound Forge and Fruity Loops for all of this album. There are some elongated sounds behind tracks on this record that came out of a program called Coagula. It's fucking amazing, I love the program. I found it on accident while looking for something to replace Sound Forge.
One of the sounds used on this record was sampled with a piece of shit stick, factory, piece of hell microphone. It is a cat we were babysitting that would cry and cry and cry. So naturally I had to sample it as best I could and use it in a track. It sounded pretty cool. I'll leave the track it was used in to mystery. There were also various other little samples from that day that made their way in.
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Vent Two:
Calculated Time Consumption . disc one . disc two .(.rar archive download)
Disc One:
01 . cremation
02 . fist fuck
03 . white hail
04 . bloody orgasm
05 . moldy limbs
06 . mangled circuits
07 . envelop
08 . thrown aside
Disc Two:
01 . prosthesis
02 . rusting psyche
03 . removal from sanity
04 . sweet sweep
05 . crystal explosions
06 . liquid satire
07 . greedy blister
08 . destruction
This album was recorded entirely with Fruity Loops. Very few samples were imported from other programs. There were a couple created in Coagula. The premise of this album was further experimentation with sound and ways to do things. I pushed myself to try and entirely ignore all rules i knew of concerning music. The only problem I have with that in hindsight is there were far too many repeated loops that were not altered from bar to bar.
There was some horribly recorded Guitar on this album. It was recorded via a mono to stereo converter jack wired into the line jack of the sound card. there were no filters on the guitar to fix fuzz and other unwanted sound. It was recorded with sound forge and added to the Fruity Loops sample bank.
There were no lyrics on this album for two reasons. One: I am exceedingly shy. Two: The equipment I had for vocals was TERRIBLE. Ok, three reasons. I also am in love with instrumental music. GOOD instrumnetal music. You can have amazing sound filling the room while you work and you can be totally comfortable with the fact you're not missing any lyrics. Just sounds you will probably hear the twentieth time you hear it. Not sound and lyrics. I suppose it's pleasing without any self imposed pressure.
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Vent Three:
Collection of Lost Tracks, Remixes and Audio Collages (.rar archive download)
01 . below the noise filled void (audio collage)
02 . microsize boy (s.o.n. remix)
03 . sleeping in a sandbox (s.o.n. mix)
04 . headlong staircase (fuck tiny tim mix)
05 . removal from sanity (slit wrist remix)
06 . splinters (lost track)
07 . fever (lost track)
08 . eminem's nine inches (audio collage)
09 . the perfect drug remix 1.0 (audio collage)
10 . crimson static (audio collage)
11 . below the sea (audio collage)
12 . tranquil disaster (audio collage)
I really don't care much for this record and would not be sad if it disappeared. I'll make this one short.
Remixes: I did a remix for a friend, a remix for a competition which I hate looking back on it, and audio collages i did before i even did vent one that just sat around because i didn't want to deal with the copyright issues. but, i find the collages slightly entertaining so i said fuck it and put them on it too.
Lost Tracks: there were a few tracks floating around after vent one and two and i liked them a bit even though they didnt fit in anywhere, so i stuck them on this too.
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Vent Four:
The Death of it All (.rar archive download)
01 . black depths
02 . retaliation
03 . fighting the current
04 . no justification
05 . trauma
06 . birth
07 . collapsing inward
08 . unrest
09 . movement aside
10 . blackout
11 . silence
12 . loss of will
13 . interlude
14 . recharging (s.o.n. mix)
15 . translucent
16 . window into the future
This album was going to be The River of Piss. Black Depths to Loss of Will were what I had done for it. I had pages upon pages of a notebook full of notes concerning what I was going to change, redo, add, subtract and otherwise create for the album. scribbles of lyrics and ways of doing things to continually make it interesting. I had a CD burned of those tracks between 1 and 12. Actually, looking at the track list, between Black Depths and Loss of Will, Trauma and Blackout didn't exist at the time I am speaking of now. So those 10 tracks were in all actuality an early version of a demo for that album I was working on.
Blackout and Trauma were actually created in Sound Forge using other tracks on the album as sound fodder.
The demo CD became all I had from every piece of work I had saved. I had a hard drive crash and at that time I was not backing up my original files. If you don't know how audio production works with computers and studio equipment, different elements of music are kept on seperate tracks, or in seperate files. Guitar, vocals, bass guitar, various effects -- all were seperate. Think of it as a knit glove. Each string is able to be altered or changed as long as you have the master file, if you will. But since the hard drive crashed, all I had was the glove and there was no way to seperate the threads to alter or remove what I wanted. So, the demo for what was about 1/20th (rough estimate) of the way to becoming The River of Piss, became The Death of it All. It was such a bad time for me and I was so angry and self destructive that I decided to make the cover art hand written. I wrote in pen on paper, scanned it and inverted it. Cropped it to fit, etc.
The software used in this was a much bigger mix than previous efforts. The mixing was done in Reason 2.5. Some of the sound was from refills and a few factory things in 2.5. A lot of the sound came from various VSTi plugins loaded and triggered through Fruity Loops Studio. I only used FLS to load the VSTi plugins. I tried CuBase, Acid and some other shit. I really didn't like the interface and pretty much stuck my snob ass nose up and said fuck you and did it a harder way. There were definitely samples from Coagula mixed in on this album.
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Vent Five:
Shades of Grey (.rar archive)
01 . handshake
02 . tsernu
03 . drawni gnispalloc
04 . internal clock
05 . paranoid sensor
06 . sattelite
07 . low level format
08 . reprogram
09 . blurred perception (numb)
10 . soldered, connected, severed
11 . contact error
12 . dropped carrier
13 . dead air
14 . high level format
15 . secured connection
A cd mostly comprised of leftovers from The Death of it All. Lots of little things I was playing with. I went back and finished a few of them and thought there was a lot of crap sitting around that could be pieced together. I was fucking around with shit and accidentally reversed collapsing inward entirely and thought it sounded entertaining, so I put unrest and collapsing inward on there reversed. I'm not sure many people really appreciated it but it still entertains me so I don't regret it.
This album was created entirely in Reason 2.5. Pretty sure. Not sure any of the VSTI via Fruity Loops plugins were used.
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Vent Six:
The Mario Sessions [first] (.rar archive download)
01 . version one
02 . version two
03 . version three
I have loved the Super Mario brothers main melody for a long time. I've always wanted to add drums and shit to the normal melody, so I did. I also rearranged it and played with it in two tracks. These were done pretty early on in learning music and I am excited to go back to this at some point and do some tracks using the skills I have now, including some vocal based layers and guitarwork. But that's for another day.
This, I am sure, was done entirely in Reason 2.5. Don't ask me what refills were used because I have no memory of that.
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Vent Seven:
Sleight of Hand (.rar archive download)
01 . collapsing inward (support beam mix)
02 . black depths (left right idea mix)
03 . retaliation (stripped down mix)
04 . secured connection (line noise mix)
The versions of tracks on this CD were done in Reason 3.0. Some really cool shit was added in 3.0 that I wanted to fuck around with on some tracks I was fond of. I wanted to try and make a more listenable version of Black Depths. I pretty much just changed the samples used and kept everything the same. It was pretty hard, I feel, to catch the idea I had as far as the left and right usage and swappage, etc. So I really wanted to make a more listenable song that people would actually sit through and hear what the idea was.
I wanted to do more to Secured Connection. I didn't think it felt done. Another thing I was glad to alter was Collapsing Inward. I didn't notice when I made it but it reminds me a lot of a NIN song after listening to it at later dates. But it's all good.
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Vent Eight:
Point of Access (.rar archive download)
01 . touch
02 . power struggle
03 . clear cut
04 . no leniency
05 . pulse
06 . numbness
07 . return to feeling
08 . assert
09 . tenderness
10 . laceration
11 . insertion
This album's premise was trying to make more flowing, radio friendly type songs. The huge difference between this album and previous albums is the massive presence of live guitar and a hint of vocals. The guitar is a squire strat -- pretty shitty guitar. It was recorded into Adobe Audition, rather than Sound Forge. The input is now a USB device by M-Audio called JamLab. I was introduced to a program called GuitarRig2 by none other than Native Instruments. I might as well own stock in them based on how much software I've bought from them.
I didn't use as many VSTi Plugins on this as I did on The Death of it All. I did however invest a lot of time in collecting both free sounds and picking up all the refills I could get my hands on for Reason 3.0. Reason 3.0 and Guitar Rig were a massive part in this album. Some sound shaping in Adobe Audition from samples incoming.
The small amount of vocals were recorded through a total shit microphone. I have been introduced to a microphone which is superb and will be purchased for vocals to be used on the next album. But, shit for this one unfortunately. And as long as I'm on the topic of Vocals, I actually got my wires crossed on the last track. I was working two ideas at once and what happened was two sets of lyrics that made no sense together. If you, reading this, already heard it and came up with a theory on what the song was about, I'm glad. Otherwise, it was fucking two things accidentally put together. I actually said fuck it and kind of found it entertaining for a while. But I kind of wish I would have redone it. It was a last minute change.
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Nine Inch Nails Related:
Livid [mix CD] (.zip archive download) (website)
Meant for Sleeping [remix CD] (.rar archive download)
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