Trouble Salad - Battle of Worlds
Overview: it was time to stop ****ing around and start melting face. Here is my full length debut. Even if the original conception of the project was basic noise and field recordings, it turned full experimental in general terms with this. Still total improv, but everything sounds so much better and more realized now. Cover is a close up **** of the moon, courtesy of Frownland (that's not the last time you'll hear that).
1. The Courtyard
Sound and Style: pretty much my first banger. Very audible now, volume is an issue no longer. Very full sounding to, with a cavernous and spacious atmosphere assembled from mass reverb. It gets more erratic in the middle, and eventually a crash cymbal would take us to the conclusion
Trivia, Origins, and Influences: I am enthralled by the courtyard area in the Forest Temple from Ocarina of Time, I named it after that.
But How?: more flanger overkill, just a lot deeper
2. Amanda Salad
Sound and Style: really a psychedelic panic attack of a track. Unintelligible speech modulated live.
Trivia, Origins, and Influences: this was done one day in a friend's room, but you guys will never figure out her name cuz it's totally secret. It's a Salad track, though I'm not sure what that means anymore. Originally it was gonna be stuff like this, field recordings in various locations, that's the salad. We were watching TV and havin s grand old time.
But How?: just live recording while I massacred that delay knob in real time, then I'm fairly sure I reversed the audio as well
3. Moat
Sound and Style: it's not super experimental but I might still have a hard time describing it. Grainy and crackling synth stuff with a percussive quality, especially when I tone down the madness and it almost sounds like drum hits
Trivia, Origins, and Influences: this goes back to the Courtyard and it's little creek thing out there. Then I just thought of a moat, like around a castle ya know
4. Blood Stained Fields
Sound and Style: this is a pure minimal ambient track based around a three note piano melody, with a couple variations as it goes on
Trivia, Origins, and Influences: this was the second track I ever made, inspired again by ambient Burzum. Trying to step up my own ambient game. The name comes from the battle ravaged land of post war Trouble Salad
5. Battle of Worlds
Sound and Style: some more general drone like the first track, but this time around it's more about psychedelic texture and layers, and atmosphere.
Trivia, Origins, and Influences: it was the battle of worlds, man, game on.
6. The Search for Life
Sound and Style: here's a whacky thing. Very minimal and sparse sound bleeps and garbles and wurbles. You can actually identify rhythm with this one. Another track to build the atmosphere.
Trivia, Origins, and Influences: after hearing it, it made ne think of, like, a moon based level of some weird video game, I thought it could be a moon theme kinda jam. I wasn't that into it at first but it's since grown on me.
But How? : that rhythm in question was something already included in the program. Well nit exactly that, but that's what I used. Occasional delay modulations build a surreal psychedelia combined with some noise bursts here and there
7. Giant's Call
Sound and Style: a minimalist kinda tribal thing, with a repetitive drum pattern and shrill piano-ish synth tones. After the pattern leaves us, it becomes much more minimalist with a single repeated drum hit, subtly modulated each time, until the feedback brings some noise back in to finish it off.
Trivia, Origins, and Influences: more Zelda themes. Zelda seeps into my music a lot. Came up with the title after the Giants in Majora's Mask that Link must gather and then call upon to keep the moon from destroying the world. Also it just has a right feel to the track, Zelda or nit
But How?: I didn't think I'd try out percussion on my first album, but here we are anyway. The drum sound itself is weak and muffled, no pop, no bang. More stuff that came with the program. So I made this little pattern here and looped it, while I focused my attention on random piano notes and the modulation thereof.
8. Waiting for the Su (bonus track with download)
Sound and Style: high pitched synth squeals and a consistent phasing, and delayed out vocals.
Trivia, Origins, and Influences: it's a "cover" of the song by the Doors, but really shares absolutely nothing with the original sound wise. More or less just a recital if the lyrics
But How?: I let the phased chord go while I spoke. The weird atonal sounds come from modulation of the actuall recording, not a generated note or chord.
Artist's Verdict: I was stoked yo. A full length, with great improvement if every aspect of my music. I was especially stoked on "The Courtyard", that **** slapped when I heard it played back. There are still some experiments here that would be only just blossoming, but I do think these are all great for the time. Exceptional.
At least check "The Courtyard", still stands as one of my best.