tom moody

"Word Planet in Title (Variation)" [2.6 MB .mp3]

A remix of an earlier tune. Added a drum kit that sounds a bit like a live player struggling to stay in tempo with 8-bittish music. Also more filtering on the main voices and a kind of round at the end with two parts playing out of sync.

This is a repost of a song I put up in Jan. 2006. I changed the name because it was too much like some non-US TV show or something that was drawing insane amounts of unwanted traffic. Otherwise the post and the song are the same as they were.

"RT Controllers" [2.2 MB .mp3].

The Sidstation synth feels like a real black box sometimes--there are weird wavetable sequences programmed into the presets that don't come out unless you hold notes a certain way, and/or never come out the same way twice. "RT Controllers" is tightly organized (and short) and combines several hardware and software synths, but burbling in and around the regular sixteenth notes are these unpredictable "Commodore 64 game" swoops and blurps that the Sid just seems to make of its own accord. I've been avoiding overt videogame references but more and more I just want to let this machine go its own way, as Stevie Nicks might say.

"George, it's come to our attention that someone is using the THX Sound without authorization."
"Who is it?"
"Some obscure synthesizer fan site has a page called Famous Sounds."
"You shut down those little rat bastard motherfuckers, RIGHT NOW, you hear me? Get the lawyers on their asses."
"Gotcha."
"I mean, if these people are allowed to post crappy sound clips of the THX Sound, then every little rat bastard will be doing it."
"Gotcha, George, we will burn the motherfuckers."

"Blighted Industry" [2.8 MB .mp3]

The type of music enjoyed by hormonal boys (e.g., speedbass) but the world needs more things hard, fast, noisy and arty. Used a rather severe compression plug-in, with a hard limit at -3 dB, suggested for broadcast. It's still plenty loud and had the effect of unifying a piece slightly marred by swooping and dipping volume levels. Normally the one-click maximizers are avoided. Am happy with the almost-atonal melody line.

"Experimental Hoedown (Excerpt)" [1.9 MB .mp3]

The bouncy part of "Experimental Hoedown."

"Experimental Hoedown" [10.8 MB .mp3]

This song is in several movements a la classical music. It's almost all done with hardware and there is some actual audible knob turning at the beginning. One groovebox is feeding audio into an Adrenalinn pedal's phaser FX while another alters the phased sounds with MIDI notes (tunes as opposed to simple on-off messages). Altering the wet-dry mix in the pedal slowly brings up the un-effected drum sounds. Also, the phased sounds are sometimes further altered by running them through Mutator filter sweeps. I like the matter-of-fact feel of this suite--it's 7.5 minutes and not getting anywhere in a hurry. The phased sounds resemble plucked strings--the "hoedown" part comes in around 1:45 and is on the bouncy side.

"Whit Stillman's film Metropolitan now available on Hulu!" was a hottish internet story a few months ago; a recent Stillman IFC interview touted that he was re-releasing it there. Well, now it's gone!

Obviously this is not your typical case of a video host "overreaching" and then getting smacked down by a suddenly self-important copyright owner a la a million of your favorite disappeared YouTubes. So what happened? Will Hulu be used as a teaser to relaunch old, dead films only to have them yanked when the "buzz" gets restarted? Were the rights to Metropolitan not entirely Stillman's to give? Did Hulu not meet contracted-upon ad revenue targets? Who knows? The only reason I care is I've been recommending the Stillman movie on Hulu to people--sorry for any waste of click energy.