Humanity’s triumphant escape to space, where no plants or animals exist.

Passenger arose from the bad taste in my mouth I get from science fiction stories that depict a post-Earth society without addressing what is left behind. Humanity completely severed from nature is a hollow existence.

Tiktaalik Corp hurdles us fast to that post-Earth society using the persuasive power of PowerPoint and Corel Presentations.

This album is my capstone for music making these past 5 years since "Global Understanding". It is a love letter to the 90s business jazz I grew up with and the 90s Japanese video game music I fell in love with later.

Each track on Passenger is a single midi file played back on the Roland SC-88 Pro with layered sound effects sourced from Corel Word Perfect Suite, Microsoft Office Suite and, Network Music - Presentation Audio Music & Sound Effects (Vol. 1 Business / Office, Vol. 5 Comedy / Animation. I started making sketches for the album before I bought my SC-88 Pro.

These tracks span 2017-2020 and cover all the songs I made for Battle of the Bits until this release date.

A collection of old music I made from around 2010-2017. Some of these tracks were for games, and others are just loners I don't imagine ever recycling into new music.

Global understanding loosely tells the story of the extinction of the passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius), from the perspecitves of the hunters and the hunted. How does the dove become a symbol of world peace, while the passenger pigeon becomes driven to extinction by habitat loss and overhunting? The symbology humans thrust upon animals can make or break their survial in the Holocene extniction event.

Global understanding was my first attempt at a full-length album. I was getting more comfortable writing midi files for MSGS, and I wanted to make something that would motivate me to experiment further. The album is very self-referential, with its many leitmotifs transplanted and copy-pasted between songs as they were written. The album also heavily recycles previously abandoned midi sketches.

In retrospect, I can tell this is the turning point where I went from trial and error to actually understaing the music theory behind what I like the most in music. After this album, most of my music is built from the ground up on sus chords, quartals and quintals.

Anthozoa is intended to evoke a gloomy nostalgia for edutainment software. You remember being a kid, learning someting about coral reefs to the tune of overly compressed stock music. Now, the optimism for ecological preservation has erroded with the passage of time.

The first song on the album is one of the first projects that I made using the Korg M1 and Wavestation VST. The whole album ended up being an experimental playground for tinkering with the sounds from these synths and the Fruity DX10 in FL Studio. I began to incorporate sounds from more sources as it went.

When I made the second song, I came up with the idea of making it into an album where each song was added every year. I fell off on the yearly relase schedule, but new songs are still planned.