voicecount EP
“voice count” refers to the maximum number of sounds that are can play at once before your Logic session or your video game panics and crashes.
Across a handful of game projects, I’m very lucky that my collaborators have indulged a kind of non-genre, non-sense approach. The through-line between these projects, which really only became visible after this phase kinda ended (though, did it?,) is unusual instrumentation and the bigness of the arrangements. Most of these tracks blend organic instruments (or maybe it’s more fair to say once-real instruments) with effects and software synthesizers.
The brief for these first two was something like: Miami Vice, Godzilla, post-apocalyptic, beachy but still intense, frenetic, goofy, an epic struggle for the survival of our species.
This “permission to be weird” came to a head when I had to tell John and Vinit that I can not and should not try to recreate Kyary Pamyu Pamyu overnight, or at all. I pitched them on some other instruments and colors, with the promise that this weird pinterest board of an orchestration would yield something familiar but also unhinged from reality, as the project demanded.
Version numbers (“v2”, “v3 FINAL FINAL”, etc) are out; exclamation marks are in!!
Writing and recording music like this is chaos, every time, and takes forever, but this time it started with some clear-ish questions: what instruments will feel organic and home-y, even when smothered in filters and effects? The added challenge here was to convey something like pride, mentioned then in the same breath as “90s cartoon adventure” and “Star Wars Holiday Special”.
Another fantasy world with no hard rules.
