Revenge Of The Extinct

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suffice it to say

i've written a LOT of music as Emperor Steve

specifically using FLStudio

so every so often, i encounter this feeling like i'm repeating myself

you know, there are certain chords, and drum patterns, and synths

which i very easily connect with, and they form the center of my work

but every so often that feeling becomes a fear that I've explored all there is

as Emperor Steve, with FL Studio, whatever...

but I've learned to see that fear as a dare...

to throw all the processes out of the window

and do something completely different

losing all the crutches, the shortcuts, the familiar patterns

as the eighteenth track in this process, 

that's about where i needed something to shake myself out of it

for fear of falling into a rut

i've always loved randomness in my songs, 

just aimless clicking or dragging or typing to generate some piece of random

that isn't intended to be anything, but it is anyway

i randomly loaded all the drum samples from a folder i had never used

and splattered a drum pattern all over it

you can see in the session artifacts, 

i just straight up started the pattern by playing all the noises individually

you can also see in the artifacts that i completely abandoned my standard playlist coloring patterns

and didn't label or color anything in the mixer

so really breaking from the production habits which i had grown to enjoy

for stability i found the repeating bass line to be alternately

comfortably reliable and maddeningly simple

the walkup/down was a way of breaking my own melody/chord writing process

more about following the walking up and down as a pre-decided pattern

rather than writing something that followed typical chord structures.

everything else kind of fell into place after that

it had to, there was too much random already taking up space

this is a photo i took of some dirt underneath a leaky fire hydrant

(check the original file in the session artifacts)

it wasn't until i loaded it into photoshop to play around did i see it

i cranked the saturation all the way up and there it was

a storm the size of a map

behaving in ways we had never seen before

this was around when i was learning about astronomy from Dr. Ahmed Salama 

and learning about his work at JPL using satellites to measure ocean height

which is then used to predict weather patterns

and i was also thinking about carbon emissions, and fossil fuels...

they're literally called fossil fuels

and they're the physical remnants of organisms which lived millions of years ago

and by using them in this way

we're bringing our species closer to being as dead as those fossils

pretty poetic for these fossils to be the harbinger of the climate crises

i don't necessarily believe about like... cursed tombs or whatever

but it's pretty clear that there's a proportional response

between introducing long dead things into our atmosphere

and the damage we're observing in said atmosphere