Twelve Minutes is an interactive thriller about a man trapped in a time loop, starring James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley, and Willem Dafoe. I created a cinematic, orchestral soundtrack in the style of dramatic blockbuster movies under the direction of Luis Antonio, the game’s director and creator.
I used Roli Seaboard Blocks to drive a digitally-created orchestra, and sculpted sounds that ran the gamut of delicate violins to saturated ostinatos. Matching the musical energy to the drama on screen was an amazing and fun challenge.
I went into this with the question, “What if Philip Glass made a puzzle platformer soundtrack?” and this is what I came up with.
I downloaded the FMOD audio project for the game Celeste and replaced the music with my own soundtrack, complete with multi-stem songs that can respond to fades and mixes dictated by the game logic. It was tremendous fun matching the tone of the gameplay and story with the orchestra build I had created to play with.
Video editing is hard, but I’ll have gameplay footage of the soundtrack in action soon.
The first fruits of quarantine. I took a mixing/mastering course, and channeled all of my Wilkes and Nujabes energy to flex it. Lots more to learn, but not bad for a weekend.
This album was a love-letter to the weird, vaporwave-adjacent experimental lo-fi hip-hop scene that thrived on Vine, of all places (RIP), such as many of the artists under the Fuzzoscope umbrella.
The tracks I was emulating sampled slices of vocals or dialogue from nostalgic pieces of pop culture, usually 80’s and 90’s anime. I tried to do the same, but using pieces of music that I personally was deeply familiar with instead.
Games, singers, infomercials and Christmas specials from childhood through adulthood were sampled in this sludgey, moody record that’s probably my favorite album I’ve made to date.
I collaborated with Sapah on a Jet Set Radio fan game. Sapah did the art, visuals and coding, I did the soundtrack and audio. Currently WIP.
This album is a small attempt at recreating the signature sound of Hideki Naganuma, the composer of much of the soundtrack of Jet Grind Radio and Jet Set Radio Future. After I discovered a masterpost of all of the audio sample collections Naganuma had access to in the creation of his iconic soundtracks, I dug through those same banks to find inspiration for telling the kind of conversational-style stories that are laid atop breakbeat and hiphop beds in some of my favorite JSR tracks. It was very fun, and I would love to do more.
As much of a mixtape of an album, sample-heavy tracks are sprinkled between original compositions emulating the sounds of Air (“ozone”), late-aughts hip-hop textures (“serena williams”), and lots of guitar looping.
It feels cohesive enough upon a recent listen, so the cobbled-togetherness I feel about its tracklist might just be me remembering the differences in production processes from track to track. My aim to make this album be ‘all killer, no filler’ succeeding in making it one of my stronger, if shorter, records.
A collection of songs made for Willy Bear Beach, a visual novel series by Artdecade.
Creating tracks to match specific conversations and scenes was the type of tonal target practice that I love to do. Scoring jovial group scenes required different energies than intimate dinners, and striking those contrasts for efficient tonal changes was great fun as a challenge.
A glitchy, subtle, and then not-so-subtle cover of The Shins' “Sleeping Lessons”, the opening track of their album Wincing the Night Away. This arrangement is one I pieced together mostly while away from my instruments, usually while driving between cities in my home state of Ohio.
I held off on recording any of it for a long time, mostly out of fear that putting these ideas onto tape, so to speak, and hearing them stacked together for real would ultimately end up being gibberish. After finally recording all the bits and stacking them all together, I’m really happy it worked as well as it did.
.ghost (pronounced “dot ghost”) is a cheeky made-up file extension for, I don’t know, a haunted computer file. It felt good to say and looked cool typed out, and even now I still think it fits the feeling of the album. More ambitious than my melody-heavy first record, this one was much more about textures and distortion, but, somehow, with more drums than last time.
Before Bauske was a Twitch streamer, I created branded music for his YouTube account, then called Evenly Matched.
I created opening and closing themes, bumpers, and bespoke background tracks for his video usage, all using 8-bit retro sounds - my first attempt at chiptune music, and it was super fun to make. I hope to make more like this someday.
I carried the melodies of this album around for quite a long time before finally sitting down to record them over the course of a couple of crisp autumn weeks in my friends’ Ohio basement.
It’s a quiet, somber album primarily full of acoustic guitars tuned to alternate tunings too shameful to utter above a whisper. Voln did the album art, and it still rules.
