ThePhanastasio

I'm checking out that Nickel Creek album right now. Your write up made it sound great. I'm not disappointed. Good stuff.

__________________

• Phish: Studio Discography Reviewed
• 100 Albums I Heartily Recommend
• My last.fm

YorkeDaddy

Glad you liked it! I really thought it was excellent. When I have the time I want to check out the rest of the discography.

__________________
http://cloudcover1.bandcamp.com/
http://daydreamsociety.bandcamp.com/

9-Time Winner of MusicBanter's "Most Qualified to be a Moderator" Award

YorkeDaddy

Oh, hello there. I decided to resurrect my journal and take a break from making every member on MusicBanter hate me because I think a like system would make the place seem friendlier and one-word/gif posts are stupid. Crucify me.

Actually, I'm going to dwell on that for a bit. Anyone that's known me for my entire stay on MusicBanter knows that things are different now than they used to be, and it sucks that no one cares enough to find out why I act the way I do, and instead people just like to assume I act the same way on here as I do in real life. If you make those assumptions, you're an idiot.

But it's true that my life seeps into my internet persona, and that's why the way I've acted has changed so drastically from when I was first here until now. However, one thing needs to be clear: on MusicBanter, I'm YorkeDaddy. In real life, I'm Bryan. On MusicBanter, I can let out my frustrations with life by acting out in ways that I can't in real life. You may call it petty; I call it the only way I know how to cope.

So that brings me to the point of this journal entry. I'm sure everyone knows I make a lot of music, both for my band cloudcover and on my own under the alias "Daydream Society". Creating music is basically my only passion, the only thing I really ever turn to when I don't know what else to do with myself. And I'm here to talk about my proudest musical composition. It might not be the most aesthetically pleasing thing I've ever written, but it conveys the emotion I was trying to convey better than anything else I've done.

So, here it is:

https://soundcloud.com/daydream-soci...n-a-bleak-room

I've always thought (and been told) that I have a proclivity for songwriting. I can't get in other people's heads, but as far as I can tell I'm a little different. When I'm in a certain state of mind and I close my eyes, I subconsciously hear sounds in my head. That probably makes it sound like I should be in a mental institution, and maybe I should. Regardless, I often have trouble conveying the sounds in my head because I admittedly don't know a lick of music theory or how to transcribe the melodies/sounds that are playing. I'm not sure if I'm making sense, but hopefully someone sticks with me here.

How about some backstory: I'm a college student living in a studio apartment. That means that I live in a room, with a small closet that's stacked to the ceiling, a "kitchen" (it's hard to really even call it that), and a bathroom with a shower that you have to adjust every ten seconds unless you're a fan of ice cold/searing hot showers. We have one window that looks directly at a concrete wall. Sunlight doesn't pour in at all. I live in this room with my girlfriend, meaning there's two people's worth of stuff in here, which results in there being no walking space whatsoever besides a little path that goes from the door, around our bed into the kitchen, and into the bathroom.

I hate this place. I hate everything about it. In February, I broke two ribs and had to quit my job at a gym and I haven't been able to find another since. Because of this, my girlfriend works two jobs to afford rent all the while going to classes. So while I'm not at class myself or hanging out with friends on the weekends, I'm sitting in this room, alone, feeling like the walls are closing in on me every second. Sometimes I feel like I can't even breathe in here. This is what has driven me into a deep depression.

Yeah, there's that word. I'm a Psychology major dealing with depression in maybe the most pathetic way possible: being a troll on an internet forum. Now that that's established, let's get on to the actual song. The previous two paragraphs are the best way I could ever describe the feeling I was trying to convey. Just a deeply hopeless feeling at all times, having to lay on a shitty futon because there's nowhere else to sit in the entire apartment (literally). I can't even get to my piano without moving stacks of stuff out of the way, and it's not because we're slobs; it's because we have two people with quite a lot of stuff packed into an apartment that's smaller than most people's master bedrooms.

The song starts off with a deep, rumbling ambiance. It's unnerving and dark. After about 10 seconds is an extremely strange synth that I will never be able to recreate. Here's a weird thing I do when I make electronic music: I don't save my work. I don't want to go back to it. I'll work on a song for about three or four hours and call it quits. The erratic, electrocuting synth in this song is completely bizarre but works so perfectly for what I wanted. Someone on Reddit described it as waking up, getting on a computer, getting yelled at, playing video games, and repeating the process over and over in a sad, dreary, never-ending routine that drains ever ounce of humanity you had.

The static-y ambiance and noise guitar at the end is the perfect way to top off the song. It sounds so sad to me. Maybe it doesn't to you, but it just feels so chaotically bittersweet. I'm almost tearing up listening to this song and writing about why I wrote it and how it came to be.

I don't expect anyone to sympathize or even care about this, especially after all the confidence I had left was stabbed in the heart by Roxy giving me the only "meh" I've ever seen in all my days of plugging when I played this song, so I get it. It might not be that special to other people, but I think I really made something beautiful and from the heart here. Some might not believe that electronic music can have emotion, but I think that's absurd, and I can assure you that there's more emotion poured into this song than half the songs out there.

__________________
http://cloudcover1.bandcamp.com/
http://daydreamsociety.bandcamp.com/

9-Time Winner of MusicBanter's "Most Qualified to be a Moderator" Award

YorkeDaddy

Hi!

The past couple months have been absolutely dominated by a certain artist that I am going to be talking about now. I've made several small posts throughout the general music board in threads like "albums you're digging" but I'm going to be far more thorough here.


A few months ago I was in an anime phase, binge-watching my way through whatever looked interesting on Netflix. After blazing through Death Note and Attack on Titan I moved to Samurai Champloo, the theme music of which I found quite striking.



I loved this song and naturally decided to explore the artist further. What subsequently happened is I've been spending so much of my time listening to that artist that I never even got around to finishing Samurai Champloo, so that's kind of funny.

So I found out a lot of the show's soundtrack was done by this man, Nujabes, a Japanese jazz/hiphop producer who died in 2010. Okay, sounds unique, so I went ahead and got myself a discography and slipped on my headphones. The first track I played blew my mind.



I absolutely loved the mixture of jazz and hip-hop. I recognized it as relatively repetitive but that just contributed to how soothing and pleasant it all was. Additionally, and this is something that will continue to show in his music, Nujabes was a master at identifying rappers that could really effectively mesh with his beats. Substantial, Pase Rock, Cise Starr, Five Deez, and Shing02 are all fantastic rappers with great flow and lyricism and they make repeat appearances throughout Nujabes' discography. However, while there are some tracks with absolutely incredible lyrics that I'll get to later, the star of the show is always Nujabes with his absolutely luscious beats. I mean this is absolutely hypnotically beautiful stuff. As I moved through his first album for the first time I loved the hip-hop tracks, but there were certain tracks that touched my soul even deeper.



Even if you're not a huge fan of hip-hop, I just don't see how you couldn't feel completely uplifted by tracks like these. It doesn't get much better than kicking back and just floating along with the essence of these songs. I probably sound like a hippie or something here but that's how Nujabes makes me feel, like he transports me to a different, care-free dimension. And what makes him so great is that he's no two-trick pony. You have smooth, catchy tracks like "Blessing It" (and dozens of others), you have gorgeous instrumentals, and you have mind-shattering masterpieces like what I'm about to go to Youtube and find.



This one has become one of my favorite songs of all-time, it's definitely in the top 10 at least. The lyrics are absolutely masterful:

It's funny how the music put times in perspective
Add a soundtrack to your life and perfect it
Whenever you are feeling blue keep walking and we can get far
Wherever you are

we can take it all back to the register
and start all over from the canister
let's break it all down into pieces of bright
moments that pass by like a meteorite
throw on your favorite reel that's good to go
on the analog player watch the people glow
sit back to the breeze let the memories flow
comedy tragedy all the highs and lows

This stuff just really speaks to me, and Shing02 delivers it as perfectly as anyone could have. I won't dwell on meaning or anything like that because I'm sure you can figure it out if you want to, but what makes Nujabes so great is that his music can mean whatever you want it to mean. It's pretty clear that he was a spiritual guy, and his music translates that. Whatever you get or don't get out of it is completely fine, but for me it really summons deep feelings in me that no other artist has ever summoned.

I guess you could say I feel an even deeper connection to Nujabes because he's no longer with us. It's similar to my relationship with Elliott Smith's music; all I want is to make sure nobody ever forgets them. Every Nujabes fan I make means his music will live on in one more person, and that's really important to me. So even if you don't find his music as incredible as I do, that's okay. Just giving it a listen is good enough. Have a great day, everyone.

__________________
http://cloudcover1.bandcamp.com/
http://daydreamsociety.bandcamp.com/

9-Time Winner of MusicBanter's "Most Qualified to be a Moderator" Award