Category: Musik / Music

In the middle of the 1990s music sampling was done everywhere, even in my student room.
Since I, for some reason, had become a bit obsessed with the notion of ‘heavy riffs’, I borrowed a sampler from a friend and connected it to my Amiga and to my stereo in order to fetch a riff from which I could make a loop. Logically, the riff to loop should be a riff by the band Loop that I had on CD, from the song Arc-lite to be precise.
It was more difficult than I had expected to use the available tools to work with the sample so that it could actually be used. In addition I realised that looping a riff from a riff-based song would essentially mean copying the song, which was not what I originally intended. Thus, I had to depart from the idea of perpetual looping. Since I was rather exhausted from the work on the first and only sample, I simply added some standard sounds to the mix, and turned my ambitious riff-based song into a simple standard nonsense tune.
This is still my only attempt in sampling and looping.

One of the limitations when making musik on the Amiga was that there were only four channels with which to work. In order to fill out the sound, a dirty trick I thought of was to make sure that each sound sample was so short that the next could follow immediately without cutting off anything from the previous sound. This song was a test if that would work in practice.

How much of the original song has to be retained when making a cover version?
When I made this tune in the mid 1990s, most of the Amiga-based covers were either horribly bland or simply horrible (including my own attempts). Hence I got the idea that a cover would be better as long as the elements from the original song were kept at an absolute minimum. Following this line of thought I started from four bars of “Somewhere over the rainbow” and composed this happy little song, which I believe proved my point.

Recursion is fascinating.
I had the idea to make a song that would also function as a computer program with which the song could be played, or alternatively make a computer program that would be able to transform its own zeros and ones into music. That project did not end with a satisfactory result, neither in terms of music nor programming.
I also had an idea to make electronic music, which in principle would sound the same when played at significantly different speeds. This would work in a similar way as those images which repeat themselves when zooming in on them. That project actually worked, but not very well artistically.
This song is an experiment of using the program that plays the song as an instrument in the song. Of course I had to cheat somewhat by cutting the program into pieces and stretching and compressing its waveform.
The song was created in connection to a brothel-themed party at my student residence. Hence the title.

As an ambitious physics student, I naturally got the idea to compose a song connected to each relevant example in the textbooks. The first of these songs was made to illustrate “The Astronauts’ Tug-of-war” from the introductory course in mechanics. The chords in the song were of course mostly experimental because of the topic of the example, and the lyrics were initially taken straight from the textbook. However, the words soon had to be changed in order to fit the melody, and the theme of the text degenerated into something more pessimistic than two astronauts tied together by a rope in outer space: the complete disparity between the expectations and the realities of modern life. When the song, which was now a piano ballad, was finished after several weeks of hard work, the theme was no longer relevant and I decided to never make another physics textbook example song.
One year later I squeezed the song into my Amiga, and it turned into this simple pop tune.

I once asked myself what kind of music a lemming would create. Since lemmings are energetic but not very intellectual creatures, the main focus of the music would be on the beat, not on the melody, the harmonies or even the rhythm. Naturally, the lyrics would mostly be about living in the harsh conditions in the wilderness up north. This tune was my attempt to emulate the music of the lemmings.
I have now moved to the land of the lemmings, and now I know how wrong I was.