Goodbye MMX [disquiet0470] by ymeynard

In 2020, my productivity as a writer took a serious hit. I found myself spending more time on music than usual, though not in a regimented way. Looking back on this year, I find that I still have trouble finishing what I start. This is probably because I often don't know what I am trying to do, so my exploration peters out after a while. Like in previous years, I can do texture; it's structure where I fall down.

January: from an unfinished piece that even at 3min 45s, really doesn't know what it is or wants to be.
February: from "Blued", a piece I'm quite happy about. It was somehow inspired by Bluetech's excellent album Liquid Geometries.
March: from a track where electronic weirdness does not musically gel as a piece, a common failure mode for my music.
April: In April of this year, I finally ran an experiment and released two EPs on Bandcamp (xlrd.bandcamp.com), one free and one with a nominal price. So far the statistics for both have been equally catastrophic. This excerpt is from "Isolats", a quartet of ambient tracks all using some loops by Hainbach.
May: from "Quantum Moth", an unfinished electronic piece that's part of a project titled "Insectoid Invaders of the Astral Plane".
June: this year I kept producing some psytrance tracks. I am definitely making progress. This excerpt is from one of my several attempts in 2020.
July: from an embryonic piece that stopped at the 8-bar mark. I could do more with it but I'd need a sense of where to go.
August: from "Phasmid", a completed piece that's part of the IIAP project (see May).
September: from the first draft at a drone piece. Some months have very little to choose from.
October: a completed piece I really like but need a title for. The file timestamps indicate it was finished 8 days after I started it. Lectric Panda's Evolution was used for the main melodic line.
November: from an ambient piece where the electronic weirdness actually gels for once. Endlessly delayed percussion at 13/16ths, a vocal sample played at quarter speed and heavily distorted, some syrupy pads, that's the ticket.
December: this is a piece where I knew what I wanted to do. I captured audio from an old public domain film about nuclear fallout and extracted a dozen audio clips. I added huge reverb, a sequence in G minor that modulates on 4 notes over 8 bars, a bunch of loops and a pinch of noisy effects. It works!

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More on this 470th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Calendar View / The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen (or more) super-brief segments — at:

https://disquiet.com/0470/

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https://disquiet.com/junto/

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Image associated with this project is by Dan Allison, and used thanks to Flickr and a Creative Commons license allowing editing (cropped with text added) for non-commercial purposes:

https://flic.kr/p/3pXRU

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/