Enjoy them. Give them to your friends. Sample them or remix them. I don't care.
Email me if you like.
(Title Image by Mark Blundell. Check his stuff out, it's great!)
Subterranean Passage 1:
Not much longer now
In 2003, the only real "relationship" I've ever been in collapsed. And I mean collapsed: it came down harder than the World Trade Center on 9/11. As if the permanent damage done to my own mental and emotional well-being wasn't enough, the collateral damage was, in many ways, worse. Friendships vanished as people took sides, accusations and slurs were rampant, and real honest-to-god violence only narrowly averted. I've never been closer to suicide - or homicide - in my entire life. From that whole soul-scarring experience came the "Subterranean Passage" trilogy of EPs: a documentary, in ambient audio sculpture, of my own Dantean journey through hell, which is a terrifyingly real place that makes the most flammable fantasies of the religious look as cozy as a weekend in San Tropez. See, the worst thing about hell is that it exists inside your own skull. It's a Klein bottle of misery: it contains you, but you, in turn, contain it...and the only way to escape it is to blow a hole in your head wide enough to let what's left of you leak out.
[Wanna hear something funny about the three Subterranean Passage EPs? I don't have a clue how I made these tracks. I vaguely remember using Sony SoundForge and Acid 4.0...plus some reverb, distortion, and delay plugins. But other than that, I can't tell you how they were created or from what sound sources. All of the original files are gone: they disappeared sometime back in 2005, I think. I only have these mysterious artifacts left over now.]
Sounds like: Coil, Brian Lustmord, Wilt, the shivering sigh of an old prisoner's last, exhausted breath.
(Click track titles to download/play samples.)
1. told (3.28)
2. found (9.27)
3. hatred (6.04)
4. loss (3.27)
6. days (21.27)
7. dose (5.10)
Download entire album (256kbps MP3s with printable cover art):
Download from The Internet Archive
Subterranean Passage 2:
A special place prepared for you
in hell
Second volume of the "Subterranean Passage" trilogy: one single tense, gritty track full of droning drear, nervous seething, an anhedonic Arabic guitar solo, and an troubling atmosphere of barely-contained bloodlust. At the time I wrote this, all I wanted to do was die so that I could be waiting for "her" in hell when her own day finally, inevitably came. She would be delivered across the Styx to find me waiting with a pair of flaming hot tongs and a scalpel. The torments I had planned for "her" would be such as would make the sickest visions of Dante, Clive Barker, and Edward Lee shrivel in comparison. Some of the thoughts that crossed my mind at this time truly frightened me, but only something truly savage could have distracted me from the obsessive threat of self-slaughter. No, really. Hence the reason that I have only managed to listen to this whole EP all the way through twice, and I wrote the fucker. Good luck.
Sounds like: Coil, Brian Lustmord, Wilt, Skinny Puppy's Puppy Gristle playing at on broken speakers in a filthy operating room somewhere in the slums of Dis.
(Click track title to download/play sample.)
1. A special place prepared for you in hell (42.48)
Download entire album (256kbps MP3s with printable cover art):
Download from The Internet Archive
Subterranean Passage 3:
Please notify next of kin
Third and final volume of the "Subterranean Passage" trilogy. There comes a point in everyone's life when you just have to realize that the life you dreamed of living when you were younger and full of hope will never come to be - that the act of dreaming of something better is a foolish waste of time. At that point, you realize that the best years of your life are dead but you...you're still alive. Like some kind of zombie. (Only you don't get to do cool things like eat brains and hang out at the Mall all day.) It's easy to deny a realization like that, and you periodically need to be reminded that you are, in fact, nothing more than the inheritor of that earlier you's manifold failures. But after months of torturing yourself with endless "what-ifs" and desperately trying to recapture even the faintest spark of vanished glory, simply shrugging and saying, "That's it, I'm done" can be an incredibly liberating experience. Much more liberating, in fact, than putting a bullet in your head or anyone else's.
Sounds like: Coil, Brian Lustmord, Wilt, giving up.
(Click track title to download/play samples.)
1. broken anchorchain (9.07)
2. consider (4.06)
3. for the first time in six months (5.12)
4. neither forgive nor forget (12.07)
5. present day (8.56)
6. tedium (8.50)
7. shut the door (2.53)
Download entire album (256kbps MP3s with printable cover art):
Download from The Internet Archive
THX 1138:
Incidental Sound Architectures
OK, enough of the depressing shit. On to something completely different!
George Lucas' THX 1138 is one of the finest science-fiction films ever made - far, far better than childish tripe like Star Wars. Though the subject matter of the film is certainly not particularly original, Lucas manages to capture the paranoia, the strangeness, and the alienation of THX's regimented, preprogrammed future brilliantly by creating a film that, though it does have a recognizable plot, is more like a cross between surrealist experimental film and a dislocated documentary. Its dystopian vision is matched only by other masterpieces like Blade Runner and A Boy and His Dog.
THX 1138: Incidental Sound Architectures is not a new soundtrack to the film, nor is it built from samples of the brilliant audio architecture found in the film itself. Rather, it is a collection of pieces inspired by the various elements - visual, auditory, narrative - that comprise the film itself. It is, in essence, a set of sonic sculptures that comprise a reprocessing of the film via the wetware installed in my skull. Heavy rhythms, sliced'n'diced beat salads, and all manner of weird, mechanical atmospherics combine to shave you bald and give you a tray full of government-approved sedatives.
Sounds like: Otto von Schirach, Phil Western, Download, Haujobb, Architect, lots of bald, androgynous human drones milling about in vast underground facilities monitored by robotic police.
(Click track titles to download/play samples.)
01 Init
02 Properly Sedated
03 By The Masses For The Masses
04 Thermal Transfer (Dance Mix)
05 The Theatre of Noise
06 Holograman
07 Department of Biological Flow
08 Contortion Control
09 White Room
10 Shell Dweller (John Carpenterish Version)
11 Car Chase
12 Emerge (End Credits)
Download entire album
(256kbps or Lossless FLAC, both with printable cover art):
Download from The Internet Archive: MP3 | FLAC.
Assorted
Works
Here are just a bunch of...well, assorted tracks - random experiments, pieces of projects that never really came together, out-takes, et cetera.
Click or Right-Click files to download/play samples.
Fuck You, Melissa (7.01)
Things always end abruptly - and badly - in my world. I've learned to never get comfortable with anyone and, more importantly, never, never develop emotional ties. The second I do, the rug is pulled out from under my feet...and over the past seven years I've spent too much of my time picking my bruised and stiff body up off of the floor. "Fuck You, Melissa," in fact, is more like a "fuck you" to every one of the fickle twats who've swept my feet out from under me. Thanks a lot.
The Radiologist's Nightmare (7.15)
In 2007, I was hospitalized for the second time with ileus - a stoppage of peristalsis in my small intestine that leaves me bedridden with tubes down my throat, pumping diseased shit up from my paralyzed bowels through my nose. I was very hopped up on morphine during this hospital stay, and had some interesting opiate dreams. After I was released, I began composing a series of eerie pieces of "hospital ambience" to explore my personal iconography of hospitals as earthly purgaotires of pain and misery. The EP these pieces would've comprised was to be called Hospitaleyes. But only two tracks were ever completed: this one, and the one below. Anyway, I think this may be the creepiest track I've EVER written. I love horror movies, so if anyone wants to use this in a production of their own, please do - just remember to give a brotha a mention in the credits. :)
Discharge (3.43)
This is the other track that would've been part of Hospitaleyes had I simply not lost all interest in the project. It's still pretty damn creepy, though! Do not listen to very late at night unless you seriously want the jimjams!
goodbye, kirsten (8.03)
Kirsten is a good friend of mine. Once, though...well, things were confusing and strange. This track came out of that confusion.
A Dying Star (High Def V) (10.54)
I loved the movie The Fountain, and was quite excited when I discovered that there was a contest to remix the film's main theme (by Clint Mansell). I downloaded all the samples and set about using those spare parts to create "A Dying Star," my tribute to Xibalba, the exhausted, senescent star in the film. The remix, when finished, was nearly 11 minutes long...and guess what? In order to upload it (they had a ridiculous file size limit of something like 10 megabytes), I had to save it as a 64kbps mp3. Which sounded like shit. No wonder visitors to the site gave it 1 star. Well...here's how it should have sounded. You may wish to consider dosing yourself with LSD or dextromethorphan before listening, though, as this is - according to several acidhead friends of mine - the spaciest piece of music ever.
These works are all licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Too much legalese? Don't know what all that means to you? Hell, just ask me.