The last required track of Saturday Sounds. I mentioned in my post yesterday that I was gratified that it was done, but it didn’t have that momentous feeling. Well, as I put the finishing touches on it last night and this afternoon/evening it hit me a little harder. Done. Finished. END OF LINE.

I reserve the right if the spirit moves me to push out a 41st track next Saturday, though I don’t really think that will happen. I’m eager to start the consolidation and tuning work I need to do on the tracks I’ve selected. Here is the current selections, still subject to change:

• Terahertz
• Reliquary
• Martian Packet
• After The Blizzard
• Time And Tide
• Miskatonic Surf Club
• We Came In Pieces
• (Track composed in the new year, TBD)

I think these seven represent my strongest work this year within the theme I want my album to be, and I’m eager to rebuild these, really take my time making them sound as good as I can. There’s a few other moderately decent tracks in this project, too, but I feel those won’t “hang together” as well with other tracks. A few, like this last one, “Cult Hive”, “Desertion”, and a few others I definitely feel like work as more soundtrack-like or ambient things.

Speaking of ambient, this track is a direct result of my spending the last three weeks or so listening to pretty much nothing but 1990s electronic ambient and experimental music: old Aphex Twin, µ-Ziq, Squarepusher, Boards of Canada, Amon Tobin, and The Future Sound of London, among others. Not sure this track fits quite in that category (all of them are way better than me, for starters), but it’s sort of my tribute to a pretty unique era in electronic music: the early democratization when lots of amazing technology became affordable to people who weren’t already fairly wealthy or at least modestly successful dedicated musical professionals. House and techno were flourishing, trance was coming into its own, and some people were also going hog wild with wild experiments in the genre.

So this track is downtempo (for me) somewhere around 106 bpm, if I recall correctly. Additionally, it’s in 6/8 time, and ever so slightly swung, which in my opinion, any swing at all in 6/8 feels very “swingy”. A bunch of vocoder and wavetable samples of various people singing the title as almost a pad feature throughout. It’s in A minor, which I stuck with because the overarching chord progression is i, iv, ♭vi7, VI, ♭vii, viiº, v7 and I’m not a good enough keyboardist yet to play all those substitution chords with a lot of the black keys yet. So as you can see, the harmony is perhaps a little busier than one would expect.

I really like this one, but it’s an odd duck. I hope you like it too.

Thanks for following along this journey with me.