Stop me if you’ve heard this one before
Posted by Trixter on May 4, 2008
So there’s a pattern to my cycle:
- View things that should make me feel awesome but instead make me feel depressed
- Stay depressed for a while
- Start to feel moody and angry and obstinate
- Accomplish something that snaps me out of it
I can thank Jason Scott, this blog, and the comments of a few kind people to help me see this. Whether or not it is a cyclical bipolar disorder or something else is a discussion for another day.
So what happened this time? Let’s break things down:
View things that should make me feel awesome but instead make me feel depressed: Unfortunately, this was the result of stumbling across more of Jake “virt” Kaufman’s work. I am in awe of people who are so passionate about a certain thing (in his case, obviously music) that they can, by sheer force of will, become a prodigy in that field through research, experimentation, and sheer practice. I previously felt this way about Mark Brown (maruku barunu) and Peter Habja (Skaven); if you haven’t examined maruku’s techmaru.mod in Protracker as it plays, or listened to Skaven’s Network .s3m, you owe it to yourself to check them out. And keep in mind they had no formal musical training.
Stay depressed for a while: Yes, well… you saw the post prior to this one.
Start to feel moody and angry and obstinate: When I do this I find myself just sitting and doing nothing, listening to music like this:
- Throw It Away by Juke Kartel
- A Girl Like You by The Smithereens
- Celebrity Skin by Hole
- Human by Carpark North
- Cigarette Dangles by The Pursuit Of Happiness
- Dance Floor Anthem by Good Charlotte
- Move Along by The All-American Rejects
- Plowed by Sponge
I can’t tell if this is my “coming out of it phase” or “falling deeper into it” phase. I think the deciding factor is whether or not I’m singing along to it (“coming out of it” phase).
Accomplish something that snaps me out of it: In my case, I had a lot of help with this step, mainly help from my loving wife, some very kind comments and email from my friends, and then a later love letter from Jason.
Oh, what did I accomplish? MONOTONE now has Adlib support.
Oldskooler Ramblings 
Chris said
Heh, Network is one of the in-game tracks for Bejeweled (which uses a few of Skaven’s tracks). FWIW, most tracker and trance artists (the genre that most ex-demo trackers seem to produce nowadays) don’t have a “formal” background in music. If anything, it makes their work more interesting since they aren’t constrained by the concepts of beats and measures. Patterns are more important to them it seems. I’m envious of anybody that has the ability to make music…cause I sure can’t. (my parents went deaf when they gave me a Casio SK-1 keyboard) Its best that I stay an avid listener, at least I’m good at that.
I’m envious that you can program an app that makes sounds on a 8088 in such a short period of time and then whip up Adlib support so quickly. I never had any programming experience in DOS or anything hardware related…its not easy from what I can see. I’ve got to try MONOTONE in DOSBox… not too many older PCs around at the moment. (I had to trim down the collection, depressing)
Anyway….enough rambling…. I think most people go through cycles like this. I do from time to time, just keep up the good work.
zpinzane said
I wasn’t familiar with either of the tracks you posted here. But to be fair, that Skaven track is a monster of an “ambient” track. And considering (after assuming) that it was composed about a million years ago in a simple tracking program, it’s easy to be awed. Very nice composition.
I’m not sure how it compares to Memories of Medusa though. Nice selection of tracks on that mix. Maybe your musical genius lays in sequencing? ;)