New album:「Transmission Control: Music from Subserial Network」(Cyberpunk/Vaporwave/Triphop)

[esselfortium]

I've just released Transmission Control, the soundtrack to Aether Interactive's awesome new cyberpunk adventure Subserial Network, available now via Humble Monthly.

It's a complete album of lo-fi triphop and vaporwave to time travel to. It's also the followup to my last EP, PC LOVE LETTER.

It's on BandCamp:

(Everything 100% done in Reason, with no pop samples used.)

[selig]

Sounds lovely - listening and time traveling as I write this…

[esselfortium]

Sounds lovely - listening and time traveling as I write this…

Thank you!

[sleep1979]

Sounds lovely - listening and time traveling as I write this…

Thank you!

have to be honest here its amazing( and i'll buy it in the week its that good ( and idont expect to findstuff imgoing to be a fan of in online forums i love stuff like the 1975 , the midnight ,pale waves and fickle friends so this is right up my street wish i made stuff as full sounding your very talented

[WongoTheSane]

Beautiful! Although I would have characterized it as "Meditative Uplifting Dreamy Ambient" myself. Impeccable mixing, and superb choice of sounds all the way through. Quite rare to hear a full album where all the songs are equally good, there are no lulls. Well done.

[aeox]

Great album.

Favorite track: Demodulation

Awesome progressions/melodies
Seems like your mixing improved quite a bit from the last album too!

[esselfortium]

Thanks so much, all! I'm glad this has been holding up well as a cohesive album listen outside of its other main function as Subserial Network's soundtrack.

Seems like your mixing improved quite a bit from the last album too!

It was seven years since my last proper album release, so I'd hope so, haha

If you mean last year's PC LOVE LETTER, though, the mixing on that one was intentionally dirtied up with lots of EQ coloring and tape saturation for a "crusty old artifact" sort of lo-fi feel. There are still some shades of that methodology in a few of the songs on here, though I ended up going with a cleaner aesthetic for most of it.

Thanks again!

[jimmyklane]

I've just released Transmission Control, the soundtrack to Aether Interactive's awesome new cyberpunk adventure Subserial Network, available now via Humble Monthly.

It's a complete album of lo-fi triphop and vaporwave to time travel to. It's also the followup to my last EP, PC LOVE LETTER.

It's on BandCamp:

(Everything 100% done in Reason, with no pop samples used.)

Solid sound. It comes through well on both the monitors as well as through the iPhone speakers! That’s the hallmark of a solid mix. I like the dreamy quality to it, and parts of this actually remind me of Music for Airports. The EP sounds had a cool DX type of 80’s aesthetic which I really like! WELL DONE!

[HeavyViper]

Finally got around to listening to this. Excellent stuff, sounds like it would be right at home in a visual novel or adventure game...which it is, by the looks of it. :3

Really consistent sound overall, super dreamy. Out of interest, what's the ratio of samples/loops to MIDI in this? I'd wager it skews more to the former, given the genre.

[esselfortium]

Finally got around to listening to this. Excellent stuff, sounds like it would be right at home in a visual novel or adventure game...which it is, by the looks of it. :3

Really consistent sound overall, super dreamy. Out of interest, what's the ratio of samples/loops to MIDI in this? I'd wager it skews more to the former, given the genre.

Thanks for listening!

Everything is sequenced actually

For many of these songs I went as far as creating “source material” songs first so that I could sample myself, and generally treated my instruments with a lot of effects to get that “overprocessed sample from tape” sound. I love the warm, double-processed feel of typically-sample-based genres like vaporwave, but I like to do it all on my own without borrowing from existing songs. (It’s about my own pride as a creator as much as it is about legality!)

There is one exception, kind of: the vocals on “The Rest Of Your Life” originated from a Samplephonics (...not Softphonics) royalty-free pack, warped completely beyond recognition with Reason’s incredible pitch editing capabilities. They began as some generically energetic “baby let’s groove together on the dance floor”-type stuff and got rearranged into a completely different melody and feel. I used some of the same vocal set as source material on a couple PC LOVE LETTER songs last year and it seemed like a well worth going back to. That’s effectively the only sampling from an external source on here (edit: okay, I suppose there's the floppy drive clunk and the dialup modem sound, too).

Writing in this two-stage way was sometimes very surprising and rewarding, though sometimes a bit stressful for the same reasons. When I started writing a song's source material, I often had no idea what the finished result was going to be like at all. "Unindex" is based on the same source-material song as "September Eternal", but processed through Grain (and a lot of manual audio editing and dicing in the sequencer!) and taken in a completely different direction to form an ambient bed that the rest of Unindex was written on top of. "Disconnect" started off as an upbeat rock song that I wasn't sure what to do with, and once I exported it to an audio track it ended up transforming into something otherworldly that I never would have imagined it becoming.

Working this way also led to a couple of situations where I was stuck with somewhat non-optimal EQing and mixing that I had committed to before exporting and dicing something up, resulting in some awkward messes to work around in the final mixes, so I am extremely happy and relieved that folks think the mixing sounds good!

It's funny, on one hand I'm happy this album successfully gave off the impression of being sampled, but on the other hand I'm disappointed it gives the impression that I lifted it from somewhere

[jimmyklane]

Finally got around to listening to this. Excellent stuff, sounds like it would be right at home in a visual novel or adventure game...which it is, by the looks of it. :3

Really consistent sound overall, super dreamy. Out of interest, what's the ratio of samples/loops to MIDI in this? I'd wager it skews more to the former, given the genre.

Thanks for listening!

Everything is sequenced actually

For many of these songs I went as far as creating “source material” songs first so that I could sample myself, and generally treated my instruments with a lot of effects to get that “overprocessed sample from tape” sound. I love the warm, double-processed feel of typically-sample-based genres like vaporwave, but I like to do it all on my own without borrowing from existing songs. (It’s about my own pride as a creator as much as it is about legality!)

There is one exception, kind of: the vocals on “The Rest Of Your Life” originated from a Samplephonics (...not Softphonics) royalty-free pack, warped completely beyond recognition with Reason’s incredible pitch editing capabilities. They began as some generically energetic “baby let’s groove together on the dance floor”-type stuff and got rearranged into a completely different melody and feel. I used some of the same vocal set as source material on a couple PC LOVE LETTER songs last year and it seemed like a well worth going back to. That’s effectively the only sampling from an external source on here (edit: okay, I suppose there's the floppy drive clunk and the dialup modem sound, too).

Writing in this two-stage way was sometimes very surprising and rewarding, though sometimes a bit stressful for the same reasons. When I started writing a song's source material, I often had no idea what the finished result was going to be like at all. "Unindex" is based on the same source-material song as "September Eternal", but processed through Grain (and a lot of manual audio editing and dicing in the sequencer!) and taken in a completely different direction to form an ambient bed that the rest of Unindex was written on top of. "Disconnect" started off as an upbeat rock song that I wasn't sure what to do with, and once I exported it to an audio track it ended up transforming into something otherworldly that I never would have imagined it becoming.

Working this way also led to a couple of situations where I was stuck with somewhat non-optimal EQing and mixing that I had committed to before exporting and dicing something up, resulting in some awkward messes to work around in the final mixes, so I am extremely happy and relieved that folks think the mixing sounds good!

It's funny, on one hand I'm happy this album successfully gave off the impression of being sampled, but on the other hand I'm disappointed it gives the impression that I lifted it from somewhere

A: awesome explanation of your process...Thank you!

B: could you explain what vaporwave is? How does it differ from synthwave? I ***THINK*** the new (to me) 80’s style that I’ve begun to write in under the name “Seramik” is synthwave based on what I’ve learned/heard about it, but honestly all I know is that I’m making music that’s 100% electronic/synthetic, lower tempos than EDM, and based off of the sounds I remember from the 80’s....the fact that I sample my own hardware (and my own patches!) for about 95% of the sounds perhaps changes the genre? I’d love to hear your opinion as well as any others that want to chime in!

I’ve never had trouble knowing what genre of music I’m creating, so this is a brand new problem for me!

[esselfortium]

I would say that vaporwave tends to be dreamier, more ambient, more likely to be sampled, more colorful, more indebted to corporate music and light pop, and interested in finding countercultural ways to reinterpret them. Probably a lot of saxophone, mellow guitar, piano, Sadé, timestretching and pitch processing, etc. A friend of mine has described it as "like drowning in a mall fountain".

Synthwave seems more typically influenced by John Carpenter soundtracks and is more likely to feature a driving electronic beat and a dark, nocturnal feel. Power-metal electric guitar harmonies, big saw synths, sidechain pumping, "music to drive fast at night in the city to". Though there's more downtempo synthwave, too.

BTW, I've been sitting on a mostly-finished synthwave album for a while that I'll hopefully find the time to finish off and release sometime this year. Would've probably been done a while ago, but this project and a couple of other things came up

[jimmyklane]

I would say that vaporwave tends to be dreamier, more ambient, more likely to be sampled, more colorful, more indebted to corporate music and light pop, and interested in finding countercultural ways to reinterpret them. Probably a lot of saxophone, mellow guitar, piano, Sadé, timestretching and pitch processing, etc. A friend of mine has described it as "like drowning in a mall fountain".

Synthwave seems more typically influenced by John Carpenter soundtracks and is more likely to feature a driving electronic beat and a dark, nocturnal feel. Power-metal electric guitar harmonies, big saw synths, sidechain pumping, "music to drive fast at night in the city to". Though there's more downtempo synthwave, too.

BTW, I've been sitting on a mostly-finished synthwave album for a while that I'll hopefully find the time to finish off and release sometime this year. Would've probably been done a while ago, but this project and a couple of other things came up

Truly appreciate the nice explanation!

Big fan of John Carpenter, and I also do a fair amount of soundtrack and film scoring so his work, along with Hans Zimmer and JunkieXL, has been influential in both my own music as well as scoring work.

My own music is slower...103-115bpm, and I would say It’s very much modern music, with modern production using the sounds, chord structures, and tools of the 80’s...but probably not music to drive really fast to.

[motuscott]

Noice!

[HeavyViper]

Thanks for listening!

Everything is sequenced actually

(snip! -HV)

It's funny, on one hand I'm happy this album successfully gave off the impression of being sampled, but on the other hand I'm disappointed it gives the impression that I lifted it from somewhere

Thank you for taking the time to share your process. Amazing to hear that you worked so hard to create your own "tapes" for sampling. Makes me appreciate the final product that much more! Helps kindle the flame for what I'm working on at the moment, too.

[Auryn]

This is an enjoyable listen, and interesting to read how you sampled yourself in order to get a more "retro" sound. That really worked. I don't know much about synth/vaporwave (I'm not too big on 80ies nostalgia) but these tracks certainly capture a kind of rose-tinted image of that time in music. Is that an old modem I hear on "demodulation"? Nice touch. Anyway, these tracks sometimes conjure the feel of Sade instrumentals or perhaps Lewis - L' amour (an 80's album that was lost in time but rediscovered a couple of years ago, highly recommended if you haven't heard it before)