worm-blossom

The first real thing I did with beepbox. I was in Japan when the first four bars popped into my head pretty much fully-fledged, but for various reasons I didn’t have the chance to write them down for a few days. Thankfully I managed to remember them for a sufficiently long time!

The final part with the angular guitar solo I added a few months later, channeling a great deal of frustration. It didn’t really help me process anything, but I do like the resulting music.

This is the second “proper” beepbox piece I ever did, I think. Made this directly after I realised there was a normal drumset sound and not just chip noise.

I don’t remember the context in which I wrote this. Probably to procrastinate on doing actual work. It feels procrastinaty to me at least. So let’s go with that.

I tried doing a song that would be so unabashedly sugary pop that it would be impossible to actually like. And then I ended up actually liking it. Oops.

Straight-up pop music — after listening to this song for too many times.

This one was pretty improvised, with very little revision — just enjoying the drum track and the ridiculous reverb.

It cannot be serious Jazz music if it sounds like a chiptune piece, right?

In any case, I really like this one.

The first part is influenced by Had Miles met Maurice (a song Sam has introduced me to). For some reason I associate the second part with Dvorak, though I cannot even pinpoint why.

I think this one came out of just noodling around at 10am to relax a bit. The incongruous Yes quotation still cracks me up.

This is an earlier beepbox thingy of mine, where I got really excited that I could do reverby, somewhat distorted synthesiser lines!11 Way too much reverb though.

This was intended as background music for a demo of the backpressure mechanisms we use in Willow. And at some point I decided to keep layering instruments until I would hit the maximum number supported by the beepbox mod I was using at the time.

Never published the actual demo, but while implementing it I found a bunch of issues with the specification!

I think I did this one shortly after listening to Dirty Mind exactly once. While this was fun, I do feel like it is insufficiently funky.

My dad is a guitarist, which for some reason meant I mostly stayed away from the instrument. The guitar parts in this are almost funny in how un-guitary they actually are.

Also, imagine this played live with an actual bass clarinet! Such a cool instrument!

This one evolved out of a piano improvisation I think.

Around the time I sketched this one out, I was listening The Ascendant quite a lot. Shortly later, I used a Roomful of Teeth concert in the Netherlands as an excuse to visit Sam for a few days in 2024.

I think this is the first beepbox thing I wrote with live performance in mind. While this one has an electric bass and a synthesizer part, it is still the immediate precursor of the acoustic trios that follow next in this playlist.

The first of a collection of pieces I wrote for piano, bass, and a woodwind (clarinet or saxophone, probably). Andreas from p2panda was the bass player I had in mind. But I never worked up the courage to ask the reed player I knew, and my wrist pain didn’t allow me to play the piano part anyway at the time.

The second of the trio pieces. Beepbox is nice and all, but this one really needs an actual woodwind that sounds warm and beautiful.

For some reason, I wanted to write a really drunken tango. This one is written with live performance in mind, there are plenty of antics to do while playing this — including a completely silent chorus (which I have omitted from the beepbox version as it would be rather boring without any stage antics).

Pretty sure the drum part came first, and then I added the remainder of the music. I do not remember why I did something for the trio format with a drum machine part, but hey — I like the result!

As usual for the trio format, this would sound a lot nicer with real instruments. Oh well.

This one would need more development before it would work as a live piece. But it somewhat works as a beepbox miniature as well.

In 2023 I participated in Inktober, but by creating beepbox songs instead of drawing. You can find the full set of songs here, but I’m adding the songs I liked to this playlist here as well.

The prompt for that day was “Dodge”, but I was quite tired when I got to start working on this. So I ignored the prompt and made something calming instead.

I envisioned this as the background music for a map screen in a video game. Didn’t quite end up there, I think, but I like the feeling of this one nevertheless.

An arrangement of Woodstock from memory (the harmonies in the verse suffered greatly from that, I probably hadn’t listened to the song in over a year at that point).

...in which Aljoscha used the bitcrusher effect of goldbox for the first time.

Most fun prompt of the month!

I think I did this one in under 15 minutes because the day was almost over and I still needed to do the daily piece.

It is salsa. Get it? Yeah...

In hindsight, the beginning sounds a bit like some Hans Zimmer score.

I remember this took a lot of time, with something almost resembling actual orchestration happening at the end.

Huh. That modulation to make the loop work is... something.

Hell yes! Beepbox offers this interesting mode of writing that is not quite improvisation (because mouse input is not in real time, and I have not yet looked into keyboard-based live input), but pretty close to it (I would not compose that solo part like this). The result is quite fun in any case.

One of the few inktober pieces I mostly did in my head and then simply wrote down at a later point. I worked this one out on the commute after work. And I couldn’t point to why it felt so familiar, until Sam’s immediate comment of “Laura Palmer”. Which explains everything (if you have heard the Twin Peaks intro often enough).

Surprisingly good to keep on endless repeat.

Such a nice prompt.

A rondo. Actual chamber music. Huh...

These retro sound pieces are always so fun =). Any similarities to first-generation Pokémon battle music are purely coincidental.

Sparkly indeed.

This one was fun to write!

And a calm piece to mark the end of inktober 2023. I was very low on time for this one, but that ended up working out nicely.

This is one of those pieces where it was simply late in the evening and I wanted to relax a bit. Which also meant I did not care that I self-plagiarised from 2023 Inktober piece number three.

Every once in a while I listen to Snarky Puppy, and then something like this happens. There is also a hidden quote from this beautiful EP, which @Ansuz had shared on Secure Scuttlebutt years ago.

Made this after listenting to David Bowie’s Earthling on repeat for hours. Such a good album!

An arrangement of a German folk song, for five nondescript woodwinds.

I wrote this after listening to a live performance of Meredith Monk’s Panda Chant in the morning; when I arrived home I went to look up more of her music, listened to Paris, and then felt the urge to sketch something myself. And somehow this happened.

Wrote this for year 2025 week 44 while I had a cold and a light fever. Ended up scrapping this because on the day of the website update I read Sam’s piece on decimal time in the French revolution and I just had to decimalise the first bit of music of the website instead.