|
By Rob tAsHman, 2025.
Table of contents
Disclaimer
Preface
The man behind the music
My spoon has been bent
Pre-Monster Violence experiments
Hey kids, music is fun!
"The Bunnyrabbit Hop"
An album, an artist name, and an album title
The album cover
The rest of the Monster Violence songs
"Angst-Ridden Playboy"
"CRC OCD"
"Creeping Eruption"
"Down to One Evil"
"Eavesdropper"
"I Wanna Live on Silver Street"
"Monophobic Loners"
"Motivational Speech to Employees"
"Reload"
"Staple Remover"
"This Sent Them Over the Edge"
"Tonedeath"
"Vicious Cycle"
The liner notes of Monster Violence
The CD-R
Disclaimer
AI had no hand in writing any of this. Look, it's still possible to use your own brain in 2025!
"Oh, Jeffrey, why did you write so many words about this silly old album..." Because I wanted to, thanks for asking!
Preface
Monster Violence was the title of my very first album of original music, which I was working on from 2000 to 2003 in my late teenage years. This album, unfortunately, was canceled during its production and abandoned. The reason for its abandonment is very unclear to me. I never remember a point where I thought, "OK, that's it, I'm done with this thing." I know I grew very frustrated with how its songs were created—I am completely self-taught in regards to music production and, in those days, it was a real struggle for me since I didn't know how else to go about doing what I wanted to do. I have a real soft spot for this album, though, which likely is evident due to the fact I've written so much about it here.
I feel as though my "mission statement" or "intention" for the music I create has not changed at all since I first began working on this album. I've never thought of my musical output as being from distinct periods or intentional shifts in style. I think of it all as one continuous thing. I'm just doing what I always have done.
Monster Violence was planned to contain fourteen tracks. Of those fourteen, only five were ever fully completed. I still remember all of the ideas I had for the album, though, which you can read about here. I still have many of the original audio files I was using to piece the songs together, but some files—including the completed songs—were intentionally deleted by me to free up space on the small hard drive inside the computer I was using at the time. However, in an unknown year I burned five of the tracks I was working on to a CD-R—one was unfinished, and another was in an early state inferior to its final form. Because of that disc, you can listen today to how some of the album would've sounded: links to five free MP3s are provided at the bottom of this webpage. Also on this page are all the images I was planning to include within the liner notes of a physical copy of this album on CD.
The man behind the music
LOL, do you like how I just wrote "The man behind the music"? XD Anyway, I thought I'd tell you about my experiences with music before I began to make my own. Would that provide any further insight or anything? Maybe, who knows. Print this out on your inkjet printer and give it to your psychotherapist to get their refined opinion.
When I was just a wee little young one, I had a favorite radio station that I listened to a lot. It was found at 99.5 on the FM dial, and I think its name was something like..."Electric 99.5"?? (That's just a total guess—the station changed its name at one point and I believe I'm thinking of its later name). It was a Top 40 station, as I recall. I have a memory of receiving a brightly-colored radio as a birthday present and immediately tuning it to 99.5—when I did this, my brother said something along the lines of, "He tuned it to his favorite station!" Just imagine little bitty Jeff listening to the Boy Meets Girl song "Waiting for a Star to Fall" (that song still strongly reminds me of being five years old).
Sweet baby Jeff had a collection of cassette tapes that he'd listen to regularly in the car on his Walkman. One of these tapes was a cassette single of the Bobby Brown song "On Our Own" (I unironically still think that's a decent song). I also had The B-52s song "Love Shack," the Prince song "Partyman," you know, things like that. I had a bunch of tapes with only one or two songs on them. When it was Hammer Time in America, I got a cassette of the MC Hammer album Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em and listened to that a lot, as well (and I much later bought a CD of that album online, which is still in my collection). I was also a big fan of the Jesus Jones song "Right Here, Right Now," the EMF song "Unbelievable," and the Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers song "Swing the Mood."
In those days, my brother, who's five years my senior, was more interested than me in actively seeking out new music to listen to (and I bet he still is today, too). I remember when the bombshell of the Nirvana song "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was dropped upon America. I was in the car with him one day while he was traveling somewhere for some event. The radio had been playing, and when he exited the car at his destination, he said, "Let me know if you hear anything by Nirvana!" I was very intrigued by his statement.
I did end up hearing Nirvana (obviously, who didn't back then?). That began an obsession I had with their music. My god, I used to listen to them way too much. I made a mixtape of my favorite Nirvana songs and listened to it ad nauseum—I once even listened to that tape while in the audience at a choral concert in which my sister was singing (I was a frustrated little boy...still am). A local record store at the time carried Nirvana bootlegs on CD that cost thirty dollars each (wow, what a steal!), and I'm sure I raised some demons up out of hell because I wanted all of them so badly. I hadn't been hypnotized by the mystique of Kurt Cobain and wasn't obsessed with him as a person—I just really liked his music. It is kind of funny; I can't really articulate what I liked so much about it. I still listen to Nirvana today once in a while, but not too often and not on cassette tape these days. I do now think that some of their songs get a little repetitive (just take him home already, Grandma!). I've always hated certain Nirvana songs, too.
In the mid-to-late 1990's, I wasn't exactly building up my own collection of cassettes and CDs. My brother, on the other hand, was. I remember often entering his bedroom to be like, "Hey, Bro, what's up? Can I bother you? Can I annoy you? I bet I can!" (Yeah, I was a stupid little brat in those days, sorry.) He would usually be listening to music at the time, and I was always interested in hearing it. He listened to a lot of indie-rock/punk/riot-grrrl stuff back then. Of all the music I heard in his bedroom, and in the mixtapes he would play in the car, I made two of my own mixtapes—within a couple years of each other—of my favorite songs. And guess what, folks? I listened to those tapes too much, too! They were my personal soundtrack for when I was traveling by car. I did also dub some full albums he had on CD to blank cassettes, which I'd listen to primarily on the school bus.
My spoon has been bent
OK, so you've now read through all that gobbledygook, but when and why did I decide to start making my own music??? I'll tell you!
The year was, well, it must've been 1998. My brother had been in college for a couple of years—at a campus located about an hour-and-a-half away—and a lot of his possessions were still in his bedroom back home. We did see him fairly regularly, as I recall; I remember a lot of driving back-and-forth between that campus and our house. Anyway, I entered his bedroom one night when he wasn't there to find a CD to listen to in bed which I'd never heard before. He had a loveseat in one corner of his bedroom, and on that night a stack of CDs was sitting on one armrest. I briefly perused the stack and grabbed a CD without giving it much consideration. The disc I happened to grab was the i am spoonbender album sender/receiver.
I listened to that album in bed that night, and I could never overstate the effect it had on me as a stupid fifteen-year-old brat. I was so intrigued by everything about it. I dubbed the album to a blank cassette and listened to it every night for literally a month straight, at least. I analyzed every little bit of it, particularly how the songs were structured. The sound of the album is so interesting, too. I'd never heard anything like it.
I don't remember the exact moment I decided to try making my own music after hearing that album, but, hey, guess what I've been doing ever since?
Pre-Monster Violence experiments
The very first "music" I ever made was some dinky pseudo-beatbox stuff in my own voice that I recorded with a cheapo computer headset—using Microsoft Windows' stock Sound Recorder software—when I was fifteen years old or so. I believe I did this just to amuse myself and don't consider it canonical to Robot as Human. This masterpiece of a song was originally just a two-second loop, but later I extended it to four playthroughs of the loop featuring some manipulations spliced in using the same software. I believe I saved the final recording as "FUNKAY.wav" (was that the cool way of spelling "funky" in those days?). It, at different times, served as either the Microsoft Windows startup sound or the America Online log-in sound on the family computer. I remember that my imagination was piqued when I later thought about making some stuttering edits at the very end of the song, but I'm pretty sure I never ended up doing that. It's possible that I still have this WAV file on a CD-R somewhere, but I wouldn't count on it and also wouldn't know how to find the right disc because it wouldn't be clearly labeled and I have a collection of six-or-so spindles full of them.
The next song I made, still using Windows' Sound Recorder, was an untitled creation that later ended up being revisited as the first track I made for Monster Violence. This initial version just consisted of a simple drum beat, with occasional samples of young kids talking which were sourced from CD-ROMs I possessed. One of these samples was of a young boy saying, "Look, Mommy, I can make my bunnyrabbit hop!" (Why did I use that particular sample, you ask? I dunno, I wanted to.) This version of the song probably lasted for around twenty-five seconds, and the later Monster Violence version used the same beat and drum samples as this initial creation. One difference between the two, however, is that in this first iteration I looped an additional sample of a boy saying, "Good boy, Sammy!" I'm not sure why I didn't use that sample in the Monster Violence version (I probably should have). I remember I saved this creation as "s.wav," which was a very poor filename to give it, and unfortunately I lost this file a long, long time ago.
Hey kids, music is fun!
So now I was getting interested in making music with a computer. Creating my little songs with Windows' Sound Recorder was very cumbersome, though. I had no idea how to do it any differently, so I searched the Internet for some sound-editing software (I remember I liked using Hotbot for a search engine back then, I want my Hotbot back). Eventually I discovered a piece of software called Goldwave. I tried its demo version and really liked it! And, believe it or not, this software is still in development today and I still frequently use it! I think it's better than Audacity (even though it isn't free), but Audacity does have some cool filters and stuff. I ended up using the demo version of Goldwave for a long time, but did eventually purchase it to forever rid myself of the "Please register this software!" popup message that had plagued me for years.
Now I had exciting new software to make music with! Initially, my music-making technique involved opening individual samples of drums in Goldwave, making a short beat with them, and then looping that beat to extend it. I still have one of the text documents I used to keep track of the exact point at which to mix the individual drum samples (because I've always been about doing things manually), which is pictured below.
But, hey...with Goldwave, you can also make the samples louder or quieter, you can fade them out, you can adjust their pitch...the possibilities just became much greater...
"The Bunnyrabbit Hop"
(A free MP3 of this song is linked down below!)
For my very first song that I would create using Goldwave, I decided to revisit my untitled creation from earlier that I saved as "s.wav." Or, was "s" its official title? Who knows, but it certainly needed a better name than that. I decided to use the same drum and speech samples and make the same beat with them, but I thought this version should be a lot better.
If I may go off on a tangent for a bit, something I've enjoyed since the age of two are video games. I was really into keeping up with the video-game-emulation scene in the late 1990's. I thought it was so cool how you could download Nintendo and Sega games from the Internet and play them on your computer. "Wow, this game is now playable in the new version of this emulator! Cool!" "Oh, wow, there's a new emulator for this console!" I really enjoyed keeping up with the progress. Finding a particular game online could end up being a challenge, though—I remember scrolling through various web pages with lists of games to download to your computer, hoping that I could find all the games I wanted. There's been a rumor circulating that, during that era, I played through the entirety of the Super Nintendo game EarthBound using a computer keyboard and a PC with a broken sound card. I can now finally confirm that rumor to be 100% true (and I kind of think now that the music is the best part of that game, oh well). If you're puzzled as to why I'm suddenly discussing video-game emulation, it's because it has some bearing on the next paragraph.
I thought that the new version of this track needed to have a melody playing during the drum beat. For the sound I would use, I chose to sample a short section of a bass tone from a Nintendo Entertainment System game running in an emulator, then pitch that sample up and down in Goldwave to create the melody. I have no clue which game was running when I captured the sound, but knowing that information is rather irrelevant since NES games inherently cannot sound too different from one another due to technical limitations.
So, yeah, now I could make a more complete-sounding version of "s". I even decided to make a little breakdown section for the now-titled "The Bunnyrabbit Hop," or a bridge or whatever you want to call it. The finished version of this song ended up being a full three minutes, which I was probably pretty pleased with back then.
An album, an artist name, and an album title
OK, so I don't remember exactly when I first decided to make a bunch of songs and gather them together on an album, but I know it was something I'd been thinking about for a long time. I also don't remember if I had been working on other songs at the same time as "The Bunnyrabbit Hop," but that certainly is a possibility. In any case, that's what I was doing back then (and likely doing today, too). I have fond memories of my days and nights of being on the computer in my bedroom—using my sister's PC when she was home from college—and working on my songs. Or...was I also making them on my family's other PC? Oh jeez, I probably was but don't remember that as clearly. Transferring files to and from different computers wasn't anywhere near as easy back in those days as it is today.
I do remember exactly why I chose the artist name "Robot as Human," though. I decided on that as I was making Monster Violence. Was it biting social commentary on the current state of modern society? Or...oh my god, do I think I'm actually a robot?!?! NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!! No, calm down, man, it was just a joke about the music I was making. I remember one night of lying in bed and thinking about my songs, and realizing that they were very repetitive and didn't have much emotion. I thought that if another person heard them, they would say the music sounded like a robot trying to compose a love song. After some time, that grew into the artist name Robot as Human. I made the decision back then to always use that name for all of the music I create, no matter what. I dunno, that was just a personal choice. I know some artists like using various artist names for their full body of work, and that's perfectly fine, too.
As for the phrase "Monster Violence," I remember where that came from, as well. In the late 1990's, there was a day when my family and I were visiting my grandfather in the hospital. I think the hospital was somewhere in the state of New York, if I'm remembering correctly? Anyway, I remember being in his hospital room to keep him company. At one point during the visit, I glanced around his room out of curiosity. My eyes landed on a newspaper lying on a small table-on-wheels near a corner of the room. I scanned it over and saw a small black-and-white ad for the Godzilla film that was playing in theaters at the time. You know, the one starring Matthew Broderick in the lead role? In a corner of that ad, the film's MPAA rating of PG-13 was displayed and the reader was informed the film received that rating due to "monster violence." I was very amused by that and decided to make that phrase the title of the album I wanted to work on.
The album cover
Yeah, so the cover art you see above isn't final, but it's as close to final as it ever got. I think I was planning to include the text "Robot as Human" and "Monster Violence" somewhere on there. Maybe I wasn't, though, I'm not sure. Forgive an old man of his fragile memory.
The cyclops featured in the art was drawn by me. Before you go complimenting my drawing skills, let me tell you to stop because I still draw like a six-year-old to this very day. The cyclops I drew was copied exactly from a book teaching children how to draw certain predefined things. My copy originated during...middle school, maybe? I was in the building where I attended school—waiting for my sister to be finished with some event she was attending—and all alone inside the room in which I had been taught sixth grade. I was wandering around the room, looking at the various things in it, when I spotted the how-to-draw book. I flipped through it and must have thought, "Hey, I want to draw this," when I saw the cyclops. I still remember sitting down and drawing it. I took that drawing home with me, and one day I even arbitrarily put it in a small picture frame (I really don't think I was super-proud of the drawing but, OK, do whatever you want, man). I still have that drawing in my possession somewhere in its little frame.
The rest of the Monster Violence songs
Prepare thyself, Internet, I will now discuss every other song that was intended to be on Monster Violence. I did give a lot of thought to them and still remember my original ideas, though some songs never got far into development. As for a track order for this first album of mine, I don't really think I decided on anything final. I remember working on the album's back cover on the computer—meaning to pair it with a physical CD—and know I had a list of the track titles on there. What I don't know now is what that order was or if I was satisfied with it. I likely wasn't.
Because there wasn't a final track order for the album, I will go through each song alphabetically by title.
"Angst-Ridden Playboy"
If you're looking at this song title thinking, "What the fuck is 'Angst-Ridden Playboy' supposed to mean???", it was just intended as an oxymoron. You know, there are "playboys"—people who spend their afternoons on yachts drinking one-hundred-thousand-dollar bottles of wine. I thought it was humorous to think of people like that being filled with inner turmoil about their lifestyle (maybe this title was influenced by me being forced to read The Great Gatsby in high school).
...Ohhhhh yeah, this song was the last one that I ever worked on for this album. I'd been piecing this track together for a while when an idea for it suddenly struck me. So there's this film from 1999 titled A Kid Called Danger. I've never seen the film myself, and it's likely rather terrible, so don't waste your time watching it yourself, OK? Anyway, somehow I heard a bit of dialogue from it on the television one day—I don't know if it had been from me channel-surfing or randomly recording stuff to VHS tape or what. I heard that dialogue and thought, "Oh, I should put that at the beginning of that song..." Yeah, so this song would've began with a forty-five-second clip of dialogue from that random, crappy film (don't ask me to justify my decisions, I am unable to). Once I had that idea, I pestered my mother to get a DVD of the film from Netflix. (This was back when Netflix wasn't just about terrible, "binge-worthy" films and series they self-produce.) I just wanted a high-quality audio clip of that dialogue, but then she asked, "What is this film? Is it good? Why do you want it?" At the time, I had kept my music very private, only to myself. "Just get it, Mom." She did, and I recorded that dialogue to the computer. On a side note, she told me afterwards that she watched the film herself before sending it back to Netflix and thought it was pretty bad.
The middle section of this song would've consisted of a short melodic phrase set to a looped sample of drums taken from a Minutemen song that was slowed down with Goldwave (let us all now take a moment to appreciate how good of a drummer George Hurley was). Throughout this, you hear a sample of vocals taken from a song by—oh hell, what was that stupid band's name? ...Godsmack. The lyric line I sampled was "I'm not the one who's so far away." That sample would be repeated multiple times, but the "away" would sound different each time—it may be time-stretched out, slowed down in pitch over time, heard in short echoes, et cetera. I guess I considered that sample to be the titular "angst-ridden playboy": someone who makes rash decisions and judgments based on their sudden emotions, or something like that? I dunno.
After that part, you'd hear a loop of a spooky-scary sample of wind blowing. Then, the song would transition to its final, odd section consisting of a short loop of that Godsmack sample—which would be in another loop of being higher then lower in pitch—set to completely different drums. The song would've then faded out. I'm sure I knew what I wanted the structure of this song to be back when I was making it, but I never pieced all of it together to make a finished recording for whatever reason.
"CRC OCD"
Is the title of this song just random letters, you ask? Nope, of course not, I wouldn't do that.
"CRC" stands for "cyclic redundancy check." For the non-computer nerds out there in Internet land, this is a process you can run on any file on your computer which will return a series of letters and numbers. Every time you modify and save a file then run this kind of check on it, the series of letters and numbers will change. It's for ensuring that a file you're working with is exactly what you think it is, which can be helpful at times.
"OCD," meanwhile, stands for "obsessive-compulsive disorder" (Oh, you knew that already? OK.) For a little insight, I actually had some obsessive-compulsive behavior myself in my adolescence. I remember having an absurd routine for petting the family cat (it's sort of ridiculous for me to think about now). That sort of behavior in me disappeared naturally a very long time ago, though. I'm sure people with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder know very well that it's a nightmare to have to deal with. I hate when people without any severity of the disorder casually say things like, "Sorry about that, my OCD was acting up."
I remember why I chose to give this title to one of my songs. One day, I was browsing an Internet message board devoted to...something or other, and I saw a post from someone talking about his/her collection of MP3s he/she had saved to his/her computer. (Oh my god, do I really need to do that pronoun stuff? Thanks, English!) They were talking about how they had kept a record of all the CRC results (aka, checksums) of their MP3s, but then a program on their computer modified every MP3 file without their knowing (likely the MP3s' metadata) and they were pissed that they needed to run the check on each file again. I then imagined someone with OCD running the CRC on all of the important files on their computer every day, logically or not.
This song was going to be drum-heavy and would've began with a few false starts to emphasize the "OCD." The majority of it would've consisted of variations on a two-second loop of LOUD drums. Sprinkled throughout would be little melodic phrases of...some kind of sound that was manipulated with Goldwave. I still have the audio files for this track and really have no clue where these melodic phrases came from. They've been processed very heavily.
Yeah, the song wouldn't have been much more than that. It wasn't going to be too complex.
"Creeping Eruption"
There is ONE song intended for this album which I'm unable to say much about...oh, right, it's this one. I can't divulge many details because I basically got nowhere with it. I'm not even sure if the above title is what I wanted to call it but think it's pretty close.
The development of this song only got as far as a six-second-or-so loop of an electric guitar playing out of key, which the song was going to open with—I arbitrarily pitched the guitar up and down to make it go off-key. I know I wanted to then introduce some drums to go along with it but never got to that point. I'll never know what this damn song was supposed to be, sorry.
"Down to One Evil"
(A free MP3 of an incomplete version of this song is linked down below!)
The title of this song is meant to be the "opposite" of the common phrase, "up to no good" (tee hee, I'm so clever).
Yeah...this one was a bit weird. I'm glad an incomplete version of it exists today, which you can listen to down below. If you're wondering whether a complete version ever existed, the answer is no. This is as far as it ever got.
This track is a sound collage surrounded by a loose narrative. I should preface it by saying that when I was working on this album, I was the most depressed I've ever been in my life. I tried to not let that affect me too much but it's likely a little evident in this song.
The dialogue sampled in the second section of this track (i.e., the "Look at this, look at that" part) is from an episode of the soap opera As the World Turns. I still remember recording this speech to the computer by capturing the sound from a VHS tape through the television using a dinky headset, with the TV volume turned up WAY too loud. This took place at some ridiculous hour—like four or five in the morning—when the rest of my family was sleeping.
As for this track being incomplete, it was planned to have a final section that was never created. In that section, you would have heard a looped sample of a sad-sounding guitar, set to samples from the 1956 film Forbidden Planet and of someone crying (jeez, I was depressed, OK?). I remember not knowing for a while what guitar sample to use for this ending, but then I happened upon the perfect choice when listening to a CD my brother owned. I really should've finished this song.
"Eavesdropper"
Yeah, this song. I remember having and listening to a finished recording of it at one point, but now that file is long gone, which is a shame.
This song was based on samples taken from a Korn song and a Mandy Moore song (two great tastes that taste great together!). The majority of the song featured a looped sample of drums from the Korn song which had been processed to sound robotic. While you were hearing that, various samples of organ playing that I downloaded from the Internet and processed in Goldwave were introduced (I still have those organ samples today and they're kinda cool sounding). At a critical point of the song, the sample from the Mandy Moore song was heard: the line "Wanna be with you," which also had been processed to sound robotic. This new sample was then looped along with the Korn sample.
I called this song "Eavesdropper" to mean as though you were listening in on a conversation you weren't meant to hear. I think the song was pretty good but it wasn't my favorite on the album.
"I Wanna Live on Silver Street"
Oh yes, this was going to be track 1 on Monster Violence.
I remember the origin of the title to this song. I was riding in the car one day with my family, per usual, and at one point we passed by a road sign that read "Silver St." I saw that and thought to myself, "I wanna live on Silver Street." Did I really want to live on that street, though, you're now wondering? No, actually, I didn't. I was just entertaining myself, per usual.
This track would've featured heavy usage of the sound of the doorbell from the animated television series The Jetsons. There were drums that went along with it, too. At a certain point in the song, this would change and you'd then hear variations on these sounds which were run through the delay effect in Goldwave. And, uh, yeah, that's it. It's not like this song was going to be that earth-shattering or anything.
On a side note, I watched The Jetsons on television a lot as a child—I've always thought it's a much better show than The Flintstones. I watched that cartoon so much that I remember once looking up an episode guide on the Internet years later to see if I had seen every episode. As it turns out, there was ONE episode that I had never seen! Just one! I believe the title of that lone cartoon was something like, "Dude Ranch," so feel free to email me a four-hundred-megabyte MP4 file of that episode sometime if you'd like.
"Monophobic Loners"
The title of this song is another oxymoron (jeez, I guess I was really into those at the time). "Monophobia" is the fear of being alone, and a "loner" is a person who prefers to be alone. I myself prefer to be alone but that's just because I'm an introvert. I've never been afraid of being alone, so the phrase isn't intended to be autobiographical or anything.
...Ohhhh yeah, I remember this song really well now. It was slow...very slow. I've done the math in the past and figured out its tempo was, like, twenty-something or thirty-something beats per minute (that was intentional, of course). The song consisted of simple bass notes set to a slow beat.
Throughout this song, you would hear time-stretched samples taken from the Rednex song "Cotton Eye Joe." You remember that classic, right?: "Where did you come, where did you go?" I heard it had a resurgence on TikTok at one point or whatever that bullshit is. The sample from that Rednex song most used in my song was "Where did you come from." I time-stretched it out so it was nice and sloooooow while in time with the tempo. Near the end of the song, you would also hear "Where did you go" once. I think I was still planning out the structure of this song when I canceled the entire album. Oh well, at least you got to read about it.
"Motivational Speech to Employees"
(A free MP3 of this song is linked down below!)
This one was a bit ridiculous. It was fully completed and survives to this day, so you can listen to it down below if you wanna.
The main focus of this song is the robotic voice that rambles on nonsensically for most of it. Let me now tell you the story behind the nonsense. At one point in time, I came into possession of a CD-ROM that contained some speech-dictation software. You know, that "You talk, it types" kind of deal? I want to say that the CD-ROM came from a cereal box but really have no clue if that's actually true. Anyway, I saw that disc and thought, "All right, let's test this bad boy out." I installed it on my sister's PC and started yammering at it through my little computer headset. I should mention that any speech-dictation software in those days was far from the most reliable thing. I remember it needing lots of training with your own voice in order to work well. I, on the other hand, was just interested in if it worked at all. I said a lot of random things to it but the text I saw appear on the computer monitor was nowhere close to what I had said. That's comedy gold, ladies and gentlemen! I had too much fun seeing the random nonsense the software wrote. Some things I said to it actually were dictated correctly, though, such as the "Don't look at me like that, don't look at me like that" part. Once I was satiated by that, I ran the dictation to some text-to-speech software and threw it in this song. I titled it, "Motivational Speech to Employees," because the dictation seemed very business-oriented to me.
"Reload"
(A free MP3 of this song is linked down below!)
Oh yeah, this song. I think I made it right after "The Bunnyrabbit Hop." I also think that if I had completed Monster Violence, it would've been one of my favorites on it.
So why is this song called "Reload"? Well, the sound you hear at the very beginning is a sample of a man saying, "Reload!," that was processed in Goldwave. The original sample, by the way, came from the arcade game The House of the Dead—I'm mad that there still has never been an arcade-perfect port of that game to any home video-game system.
The guitar-ish sound after that intro is a portion of a Deftones song that I processed in Goldwave. Do I personally like Deftones? No, not particularly. The "brbrbrbrbr-rrrrrrrrrr" sound you hear throughout, well, I don't know where that came from but it was another Goldwave creation.
Once you have heard this entire song, you can see how at one point the composition gets "reloaded." Eh, eh, see what I did there???
"Staple Remover"
Oh, man, I'm sure this song would've been my favorite on this album. Sorry that no one in the universe can ever hear it. I never pieced it all together.
This song was based on processed variations of the famous drum break from the James Brown song "Funky Drummer." This break has been sampled by countless musicians in their own music over the years. I called my song "Staple Remover" because it would've taken this "staple" of modern music and used it in different ways while processing it to sound completely different.
I still have the text document I was using to plan out the structure of this song—there would have been around five different sections. In one of these sections, the drum sample was processed to sound as though it was underwater and was set to the song "Aquatic Ambiance" from the video game Donkey Kong Country and a recording of humpback whale sounds. For the final section, the drums were heavily distorted in two different ways and heard with a recording of police radio which I sampled from a live stream over the Internet. Damn, I want to hear this song.
"This Sent Them Over the Edge"
(A free MP3 of an early-and-inferior version of this song is linked down below!)
Regarding the title of this one, "this" refers to the song itself, while "them" refers to music critics. I envisioned people listening to this and reacting with, "What is this garbage?!? What is happening to music?!?"
The version of this song which you can listen to today through the link down below is, unfortunately, inferior to the song's final form. There had been a later version that incorporated samples taken from radio commercials which were manipulated to sound nonsensical. I remember once visiting a website dedicated to voice actors—ones who were available for commission or whatever—and on that site you were able to download audio samples of their past work. I downloaded and saved a bunch of those samples. Why did I do that, you ask? Well, I did use some of them in this song, so job well done, Jeff, I guess.
The saxophone loop you hear in the first part of this song is a reversed sample taken from an instrumental cover of "Can You Feel the Love Tonight." You know, The Lion King and all that? I do very much well believe this particular cover had been done by Kenny G. Why did I download his cover, you ask? Well, uh...good question, why did I?
The splotchy drums you hear in the second section of this song were processed through a plugin I downloaded for the software Winamp. I think the plugin was supposed to remove vocals from songs (you can get better results for that today through AI, though it's still very far from perfect). I remember running various songs through this Winamp plugin and listening to the results. I know I must've heard these splotchy drums and thought, "Hey, cool!"
(The eagle-eared listeners among you will notice that the "OOOO!!!" sample used in this song was also used way, way, way later in my song "Internal Flame.")
Yeah, I remember not being too pleased with the way this song concludes. I'm pretty sure I was planning to restructure the ending but never did. *shrugs shoulders*
"Tonedeath"
Oh yes, "Tonedeath." It's a play on the phrase "tone-deaf," did you catch that? I'm fairly sure I was still figuring out what I wanted this song to be when I canceled the album. I have a handful of audio files in the folder for this song that are just preliminary tests.
This song would've started with some beeps playing a simple melody. Yeah, not too exciting, right? At some point in the song, you'd hear some kind of alarm, all hell would break loose, and the beeps would go haywire, randomly changing in pitch and things like that. At the end of the song, if I'm remembering correctly, you would've only heard some low rumbling. As I said, I never had a concrete structure set for this track.
"Vicious Cycle"
Oh, I think this song would have been a favorite of mine on the album, too.
This song was based on two two-second drum loops I made. For these loops, I randomly mixed a kick drum sample and a snare drum sample on top of themselves many, many, many times. The final loops don't sound particularly random, though—there's a distinct rhythm to each.
This song would have featured vocals singing lyrics that I wrote myself. I still have these lyrics in a text document, which is pictured below.
I still like these lyrics a lot. You see question marks there at the end because I couldn't think of the right word (oh hell, I just thought of one: "sensitivity"). The section at the end of the document would've been expanded upon, too—I never finished writing the lyrics. The vocals weren't going to be me singing—I was planning to use text-to-speech on the computer. I believe I ran into a road block because I didn't know how to tune text-to-speech to the right notes and time-stretch it to the tempo. I don't think I would've been able to do that back then.
This song would've featured repeating loops, or "cycles," of the same composition. I know I wanted the song to end with an extremely-long fadeout of one of these loops.
The liner notes of Monster Violence
I was planning to make a physical CD of Monster Violence myself, complete with outer case and liner notes. For the notes, I was not going to write any words for or put any effort into them—I was just going to include a bunch of ridiculous, non-sequitur images. I have saved all of these images, which are featured below for your viewing pleasure.
The CD-R
On a day that has been lost to time, I burned five tracks from the then-current progress of Monster Violence to a CD-R. I know I thought it was so cool that I could listen to music I created myself with my Discman. I luckily haven't run into any disc-rot problems with the various discs I've burned, but I also haven't tried to read any of them in a while, uh oh.
I remember I kept this disc in my little CD-carrying case that I traveled with in the car. Regarding the white sticker on the disc, I think I originally had written something different on it but then peeled that top layer off for whatever reason and wrote "CD TEST #1" instead. I don't remember why I did that.
Below, you will find links to five free MP3s of the tracks on this disc! Yes, completely free! Oh, you want to give me some money for them? OK, you can, uh, Western Union me three cents. That would be so completely necessary.
The only processing I've done to these MP3s are loudness adjustments since some of the tracks were TOO FUCKING LOUD because I really, truly knew what I was doing back then.
|