Music

Here is my music. In total, I have done 37.65 hours of music from 896 tracks spread over 47 releases. I am getting better at this.

BassStation Proverbs (16/01/2018 - 20 minutes)

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This is minimalist electronic music made with a single BassStation Rack and Art Proverb being sequenced from Reaper without any additional processing. This is a reimagining of my 2013 release with the same hardware.

Hologram (05/01/2018 - 39 minutes)

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“Zgon is back WITH 7 NEW TRACKS. Mainly hardware synth, both digital and analogue, running through digital effects from VisualSoundToolkit. Little singing.”

It started as a way to demo my DR-110 MIDI mod (available through my megabusiness Lynxwave here) and then I did a few more tracks in that style as I enjoyed it.

Legacy Drivers (25/09/2017 - 51 minutes)

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We all remember the days when we used to run home from work to play games on our DIGIROY 3200 or 3249 computer system, but did you know the DIGIROY series of home computers could actually be used to make music as well? With just six or seven expansion units, you’d be halfway to having a near-complete music studio machine. And it’s not just the hardware that’s important, but the drivers too.

Back then, computer viruses ran rampant and drivers were updated 3 or 4 times each week in order to prevent the hardware from become infected and potentially turning against its owner. In one famous incident, the on-board hair simulator of a Tachyon Home Computer malfunctioned catastrophically due to a series of particularly malignant computer viruses leaving hundreds dead and thousands more permantly disabled – each one lost the use of their hair.

Back then, they didn’t have the web to distribute drivers and hobbyists had to rely on the local floppy men who used to walk round with a mule and a sack full of discs to provide them with their drivers and pornography.

Nowadays, we have the web to distribute our digital files. This content-download contains just a few drivers you will need to get the most out of your DIGIROY system and expansion units.

Most of these files were created using the LMMS back when I used it as my primary DAW, but I’ve updated them to what I currently consider good.

Meskhenet (23/09/2017 - 45 minutes)

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Many of you already know me from being a brick and wearing a cow’s uterus as a hat, but I am a lot more than that. I am Meskhenet and I create ambient music in order to help people across the globe bring new life into this old world.

But this isn’t just for those men and women giving birth, but for anyone giving anything. I think the whole world would be a lot better if there was a little more giving and a little less taking away.

Enjoy this album with the love of a million doves.

Schism (18/12/2016 - 68 minutes)

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I’ve been working on it for about 3 years but I lost a lot of momentum near the end because I was trying to get it perfect for so long. It’s not perfect but is is still good. Its main theme is drum beats sampled from old records.

It was during this project when I realised that LMMS was woefully inadequate, thought I can’t complain too much as it did take about 7 years for me to realise that. The MIDI jitter from LMMS is atrocious. I used reaper to sequence and record the MIDI parts and vocals and then dropped them as samples into LMMS which may be why it took so long to finish. LMMS also kept crashing as it always has – it’s got no better on the 1.1.2 version. I think the move to a version number greater than one was arrogant, especially considering some actually good software like Inkscape is still on 0.91 and that is far more finished than Linux Multi Media Studio. Linux Multi Media Studio. What a fib. I’ve got it on Windows, it’s only for audio, but I suppose Studio works. Lying Mother-fucking Music Software I call it.

If you’d like to listen, you have to go here because now I have been signed by a record label: https://megalydon.bandcamp.com/album/schism

Racing into your ear and brains like an audio bullet, Jam-master Basstropolis Esquire’s latest offering fuses his patented brand of lilting melodies and retrofuturist rhythms with the unmistakable hiss of analogue electronics to create Tungsten Overseer – a revolutionary EP inspired by his own personal mechanical demons from which he knows no respite.

With all tracks recorded in mid-2016 AD, the phenomenal opening track Pulmonary sets a high bar for the following tracks with its pounding analogue bassline and infectious 303 hook. The bar is once again raised with the ironically shuffled beats of Y2Z that settle a counterpoint to the irreproducable lyrics re life and its subplots. Unity Suction follows, transforming from an abrasive hospital sound to the blissful murmuring of satisfied synthesisers working together to achieve world peace through audio heaven. Timeflow Meltdown dribbles into fourth place and, as is customary for the fourth track of J.B.E.’s work, combines the sound of the Sega Genesis classic Pop Daddy with the ambience of our own collective memories of seaside holidays and the long ride home through the deepest forests and over a majestic bridge.

Concluding the masterpiece is MAD, a high-energy track that takes no prisoners. Using a new technique not before seen in the music world, J.B.E. has, what he calls, “sampled” the voice of a beautiful lady so it can be heard identically each time the track is played. Her beauty shines through to make MAD possibly the perfect finish to any musical release ever created.

Instrumental indie minimalist math rock from my new band This Reaction Walking. I borrowed a bass guitar for a track and recorded some other little bits which I’ve used here. I had to split and stretch the basslines to get acceptable timing. It worked quite well. The drums are Addictive Drums.

OHJ/TWR/001

This EP is mostly just scales and arpeggios. The Roland Piano Plus 11 has quite good functionality with its arpeggio and accompaniment but the actual sound is a bit bland. The analogue drums are nice though and better than most similar keyboards. I had a 6.35mm to 3.5mm interface plugged in the sustain port for a lot of this so I could get a long release section on all the notes. I like this one.

The hit new techno EP Caustic is out now featuring classic tracks Caustic 3, Caustic 5 and hit single Caustic 6. Not only that, but it includes everyone’s favourite Caustic 4 and new tracks Caustic 1 and 7… and who can forget Caustic 2. Buy it now online or on the web now.

Caustic 4.5 not included. Caustic is the trading name of Musical Showcase: Caustic. If you have been affected by any caustic aceeeed issues raised in this EP, please contact a local help group.

Sometimes I like to imagine that I am a worm who was crawled inside the mind of priest who plays the organ. That was really the genesis of this EP and it all just developed from there.

I’ve always wanted to be a worm since seeing one perform in my favourite film (I think it was Casablanca. If there was a worm in it, it probably was). I’ve never been a real worm but sometimes I dress up as one and dig about in the garden a bit.

One day I was doing that in my worm suit, which is a big bendy tube and I heard some music from my local Church, St Baptist’s Church of Further Education. It was divine. I’ve liked music ever since it featured in my favourite film (Casablanca definitely had music). The sounds that flowed out of the church sounded like God himself was singing groovy chiptune melodies.

I had to find out more about the sound so I took off my worm suit as it is very restrictive when travelling and put on my pants, socks, trousers, shirt and another shirt (clothes). I went to the church and went through the big hole in the front . Once inside, I could hear the heavenly sounds reverberate around me. There wasn’t a lecture on so I just walked up to Jesus who was playing the organ. We started talking and he told me his organ had been sent down from Heaven by God through his trading arm giaccaglia in the late 1970s. He was so cool and even let me play on his organ. For the first time since watching my favourite film (Casablanca?), I thought of maybe being something other than a worm. I wanted to be a priest.

My relationship with Jesus grew and he often let me have a go on his organ. Since then, I visited Jesus every week to play on his organ, discuss events from his life and just have a right bloody good laugh.

But I was conflicted. The life of priestery was what I wanted to do, but I still had that feeling you get when you want to be a worm. I wanted there to be some way I could combine my two loves. I discusses my issues with Jesus and he told me that he had a similar problem and that he was actually a spider in the mind of a frog in the mind of Jesus. I knew what had to be done.

From then on, I like to think I lived my life exactly like a worm inside a priest, apart from a couple of weeks where I tried to be a priest inside a worm which never really worked for me. I became an official priest and I have the robes and everything, but I still like to imagine that when I’m up on the cross giving my lectures (which I like to do for effect), the little worm in my mind is telling me my lines.

This EP is a reflection of my journey to find my true self and is performed on the instrument that started it all, the giaccaglia electronic organ, which Jesus kindly let me use. We’re still good friends and he actually produced this album. We’re going down the park later.

This was my first time using a Scottish piece of hardware, and the Roland Mc303 (a close friend of Ronald McDonald, I believe) was quite disappointing. It was the first Groovebox released and it shows it in its limits and bugs. I felt I should put more effort into this because of the sequencer. The theme (business) and cover reflect that added effort. I look so fucking cool on the cover.

I’ve stuck to only using one pattern with each of the songs because there’s no point putting too much effort into writing things on this because it has a tendency to delete notes when too much happens. You can hear that on Let’s All Double our Profits. The 303-style line was the same thing looped but when I tried to record a lot of piano notes, it just deleted some other stuff. I don’t mind working within limitations but it’s really annoying to work with something that’s just faulty.

An interesting fact is that one can flip the MC-303 over and use it as a mousemat while on a bed.

This is electronic music. I liked it once but I kept playing it to check it sounded OK and that made me hate it. It is similar to the last music I did but less like chiptune and more like ’90’s synths. The only ’90’s synth (which is what we in the music business call synthesisers. I think that is true anyway because I’m not actually in the music business. I tried to be once but they said I was banned from music for causing the deaths of thousands of people as ruler of what is now Cambodia during my tenure as prime minister in the late 1970s. I tried to tell them they were thinking of Pol Pot but they weren’t listening because they had special music industry headphones on) on there is a bit of JV-2080.

This is much the same as the last one, but I felt it was time for me to explore what it would be like to be a robot. I think this album is the closest man will get to understanding the complexity of an automaton’s mind. A federation automaton is a robot constrained to the database. A few of the tracks have a 1980s vibe.

“An album of swirling fantasies impregnating the thoughts of their parents to create a cyclical chain of never-ending emotion. Similarities could be drawn to early acidic-techroot pioneer Carbonpipe, but the wizened old man time has honed his musical craft and given birth to a baby worth a million men. On the surface, Megazone Infinity appears to feature mostly quite basic rhythm machine percussoids accompanied by simply looped syntheses, but a closer inspection of the album through 6 consecutive listens reveals a deeper meaning to the ostensibly soul-destroying tracks. Several of the musical revolutions feature a house inflection with a four to the floor style bass drum creating a heartbeat of certainty among the other slightly less certain certainties of the melodies. Minimalism is rife yet works hand-in-hand with complexity. Slow tracks are commonplace and create a haunting counterpoint to the more upbeat tracks reminiscent of classic Tachyon Home Computer games such as DigiCrisis and Copfighter X. Each of the tracks seem to weave between different planes of existence like astral worms while still arriving at the same non-existent point in a semi-existent reality. To sum up, Megazone Infinity tells each and every story from modern life, while still foreshadowing the future. It is a monolith standing tall in a field of sand while crabs gaze upon the smooth black stone inscribed with every possible concept. This is the only album truly deserving the rating blue amethyst.” Realmag.

This was inspired, but not directly copied from for a change, by Ceephax Acid Crew. It is in the genre of electronic music.

Don’t bother listening to this; I just did it for the sake of completion. Some of the tracks have a mains hum because I had to plug my laptop in halfway through the recording session.

I recorded this ages ago but it was too shit even by my standards so fewer ages ago I did some better tracks and deleted the bad tracks but it was still too shit. I had a listen no ages ago and it didn’t seem too bad. That by no means implies this is any good; it just means that one should be physically able to listen to it.

This is the soundtrack to Sanctity, a game which doesn’t exist. It isn’t even real fiction. It is fictional fiction. It’s music with all violins and harps and shit. I recommend you listen to it about 10 times in quick succession, then leave it for a few years, then come back to it so you feel a nostalgia for it. That is how video game soundtracks are meant to be heard. Half of it all sounds the same, and half of what’s left isn’t that great, but that other 25% is well worth suffering the rest for. It’s actually quite nice. I was going to do all sorts of other stuff for it but I couldn’t be bothered. I made a map for it, though. It’s over 17 MB so don’t open it if you are on dial-up. There’s a small version.

I think this is funk. It must be, because all the names have funk in them. It’s probably not as good as real funk with real instruments, but at least I’ve tried.

My ARP Quartet is faulty. None of the switches have caps so I have to use one of those primary school-style fish glue appliers. The main volume pot is terrible and I don’t think brass brilliance or attack work properly. All that aside, I have recorded possibly the greatest EP of all time. Sorry, I’ve made a mistake; I’ve recorded the 3rd worst EP of all time.

The first duet. It would have been really boring to just do an album with a monophonic synthesiser, and I had to use the Proverb with something. I would have been allowed to sequence this because it doesn’t have its own keyboard, but I didn’t think of that until I had put it away, and there are so many wires involved that I couldn’t be bothered to get it out again. I used the HT-3000 to play it, if you’re interested, and a grey lead to connect the BassStation and Proverb together.

Realistic my arse. Realistic even have the audacity to prefix some of tones with “synth”, as if the other tones are not synth tones. I defy you to listen to this and believe I am playing real instruments. I defy you to listen to this anyway. It’s a piece of shit. The best track I did on this relied mostly on one of the pre-recorded accompaniments, which are fairly complete 2 bar phrases. I thought that was cheating so I didn’t include it. I’ve removed the hum because it was annoying. It is really easy to remove hum on the 460 because it sends one signal through one stereo channel and the inverted signal through the other, so removing hum is simply a matter of doing a vocal remove on it, and as the sound signals are exact opposites, they remain unchanged, I could have done this one in mono, but I inverted one of the channels for that Realistic sound. This means that it won’t work on mono systems like the iPhone.

I like this one. The Casiotone 610 is one of my favourite keyboards because it has some good tones and I like the rectangular design of it. The accompaniment section is also pretty good. You should get one.

The worst one of these so far. It’s a bit like video game music. You should probably just skip this one. I say that as if anyone listens to any of these or even reads this.

Another EP made with the classic Casio HT-3000. This one’s a bit a longer because you can create custom beats and basslines on it. You can really see how the Musical Showcase series has evolved since I started with it. On Elephant Meets Hippo, I cheated and sequenced the melodies, but I am frankly too lazy to sequence stuff via midi so I didn’t do anything else, and it’s not really in the spirit of the Musical Showcase series. Also, I had to start the drums manually on the machine itself. Despite the sequencing, the timing is still terrible.

Pretty much the same sound as the PSS-460 one due to the similarity of the keyboards, but with a few samples using the in-built monophonic sampler.

A few short tracks created live using just the Yamaha Portasound PSS-460. I frequently press the wrong notes and get the timing wrong a lot, but it’s experimental music, and I have to publish the results of the experiment. The results show that I should shouldn’t do any more music like this. I did an album cover of fitting quality to the music itself. Interesting fact about my PSS-460: I bought it for 99p off eBay, but the postage cost about £7.

An epic voyage to a new planet in audio form. After the destruction of the planet we currently call Earth, society was forced to migrate to Earth II, a planet much like ours, but will the new society be one of peace? Spoiler alert – obviously not – just look at the track titles. If you just want to know how the story goes without actually listening to the music, the track titles are all you need. Musically, it’s hard to describe. It’s like if you gave a child lots of synthesisers and drum machines and the only way he could really make anything is by trial and error. Well done to me for doing an album with only 16 tracks, which is almost acceptable. Look out for a musical callback on The New Land.

Volume II of the seminal Nothocrax series. I don’t think it will be influential; I just masturbated a lot while making this. This is mainly still a rip-off of Analord but has a bit of Tuss in there and some other bits.

This is me trying to copy Analord. Most of it’s alright. I might try to do a series of these like the real Analord because I have a few tracks left over. Fun facts: Nothocrax is a genus of bird. Acid Dream was just a temporary name, but then it actually appeared in a dream so I kept it.

I was originally commissioned in my own head to compose the soundtrack for some of my dreams in a style similar to that of LSD: Dream Emulator, but I started making some ambient music instead. All the names are taken from things that have happened in my dreams. Pick-up Box was the name of a band I was in in a dream.

A short EP sampling some of the tracks from the Fallout 3 video game.

Quite a few good tracks here, but if you put 30 tracks on an album, some are bound to be good, aren’t they? I provided an alternate tracklist as if this was the soundtrack to something. 1. Opening Titles 2. Asleep in the Fields 3. Meeting Nadir 4. Hunting the Badbugs 5. Leaving Town 6. Following the Trail 7. Battling the Pirate Bandits 8. Funeral 9. Escaping the Apogee 10. Battling in the Canyon 11. Turning Point 12. Coming to Terms 13. Cheer up 14. Behold the Plutus Neburoma 15. Meet Milkus 16. Leaving the Plutus Neburoma 17. Pirate Bandits from all Angles 18. Pirate Bandits from some Angles 19. Not quite Dead yet 20. Awoken to Start anew 21. You’re the Bad Guy 22. None shall remain Alive 23. Underground Stealth 24. Run 25. Marijabaloid Den 26. Are you the bad guy? 27. Find Nadir 28. Confront Nadir 29. The Battle Continues 30. The Inevitable 31. Recomposition

Quite a strong track-listing on this one.

This album would be on a floppy disk if I released my albums and if I had a floppy disk drive. It has about 70 tracks on it in midi format. A lot of the tracks are from as early as 2006.

A real mixed bag drawing influence from Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada and Luke Vibert… I do sometimes try to copy other people, you know.

Another album trying to be like Boards of Canada.

The name taken from my first unreleased album of midis converted .mp3s using online tools. A few good tracks here.

Nothing really of note here. The tracks here have a reasonable pace.

Created at around the same time as Meadow, the album names were originally reversed until I decided this album had a darker feel to it than the cheerful tunes on Meadow.

I think I was trying to copy Luke Vibert mostly on this one. Also some Boards of Canada-style stuff again.

More ambienty stuff here but still some of the usual rubbish. Mad Axes is still a favourite of mine.

I discovered how to distort things, as can be seen on much of the bass drum in the middle order. Some of the tracks are leaning towards the ambient.

It’s like a slightly more ambient Amtalic – quite a change from the first two tracks.

This is the second album I completed. I have tried and failed to emulate Boards of Canada on quite a few of the tracks.

This is my album of 8-bit music but some of it isn’t. I started it in 2008 but I didn’t have enough tracks until 2011. An album should last at least an hour, which means some albums takes years to complete.

This was my first album and it was my best. It was made before I sold out.