And now, ladies and gentlemen, the Phase album (my first CD – not first album) is complete. This is the first track which I intended to pretty much set the stage for how I felt about the state of music at the time. In highschool, kids were so caught up in ‘techno’ being ‘video game music’ and ‘fake’ and blah blah ignorant ignorant drivel. I wanted this track to make all those @$$holes feel like they were totally right.
The song title is a direct homage to an absolute CLASSIC Buzz track by Low Occurence, titled ‘How to kill the cliche’. Download: 01 Why Kill the Cliche (right click and choose ‘save as’)
This was the ‘secret track’ off of Phase, my first cd. Mellow and kind of leaves you with no closure, like a good secret track should do. Download: sn_8 (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: Jersey Reds Artist: Noggin Album: Phase Date: 1998
An early foray into breakbeat acid via a classic sample you’ve heard in such places as Chemical Brothers B-sides.
It’s all Buzz here with the classic Jeskola Bass2 -> Jeskola NiNja Delay combo in full, s/h effect.
Dedicating this one to the first people I met from New Jersey, some cool girls participating in the national video competition in Kansas City (we got 5th). Never forget that lost correspondence – “hey noggin, nice meeting you. i want to hear what texas techno sounds like”.
Named after a sweet trickshot from virtual pool. Download: Noggin – 02 Jersey Reds (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: Not Far From Home Artist: Noggin Album: Phase Date: 1998
Starting to wrap up the ‘Phase’ album, here is probably my favorite track from those sessions. Inspired by classic Faithless, this is sort an epic euro-house ballad. Vintage tracker samples render the melodies a little dirty. Download: Noggin – 03 Not far from Home (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: From Perspective Artist: Noggin Album: Phase Date: 1998
Super-melody and Geonik’s string synthesis combine to put forth probably the cheesiest track off Phase. This one is real similar in style to ‘Another World’, but with about a years worth of experience guiding it this time, as opposed to blind moseying through the corridors of tracker-style. Gotta say, for all the bubblegum brightness herein, the 909s are pretty banging. Download: Noggin – 05 From Perspective (right click and choose ‘save as’)
This was a remix of the hidden track ‘sn_8’ off my first electronic album Phase. Mainly mixed in a lot hotter, a little less subtle, and with big industrial drums.
I need to thank everyone that contributed a remix for the Phase remix project, even if it never saw the light of day. Guess that means those tracks need to find their way onto this site too, then. Download: sn_9 (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Got to get this one up as it just happens to be next in my list of ‘candidates’.
Funky breaks acid jam. The original is a ten-minute acid epic…this one was me using the power of Acid, which, at the time, was pretty unbelievable. Can you believe we used to MANUALLY loop and resample and tweak and stretch and pitch and tune our loops to be sample accurate, integer value multiples of each other!? WE DID! And often times, without a graphic display. Acid came along and changed all that. Finally, a digital audio workstation that was BPM-centric. You could somewhat haphazardly throw a ton of loops into it, and it would stretch all of them to fit into the same tempo. I mean this was revolutionary. Hardware samplers were just starting to do this, but their time-stretch algorithms were so slow and poor, that most all of them (Akai S-20, MPC, I’m looking at you) just resampled the loops (much like a dj changing turntable speeds).
This new technology gave me the power to loop up anything and everything and then just ‘paint’ songs together (I love that paradigm in Acid). This was a loop based composition then, and intended to be used as a live version of ‘Generations’. I did end up playing this one live quite a lot, required 2 or 3 floppies (so slow to load…haters), and the ‘score’ i printed out was like 6 pages of soundwaves taped together.
You can tell I’m still wet behind the ears cause I can’t get enough of those movie samples. Download: Noggin – 07 Generations (H-Town mix) (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: The Weather is Changing pt 1 Artist: Noggin Album: Phase Release Date: 1999
Just had to get the juxtaposition in with two unrelated on the surface tracks, but both coming from the same place. If I remember, a lot of people liked this track.
Buzz. Download: Noggin – 08 The Weather is Changing pt I (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: The Weather is Changing pt 2 Artist: Noggin Album: Phase Release Date: 1999
I was really into industrial before anything else concrete. It gave me the balls to actually get into more electronic stuff, and it was about all I could make on my own when I was first starting out. Indie/lo-fi/Daniel Johnston was only cool to Kurt Cobain when I was doing this stuff, and so the only lo-fi thing I could really get away with was just a ton of distorted keyboards. Either that or I was 14 and really didn’t care what anybody thought and I wanted to make my face bleed with my headphones. Anyway, I moved away from the more industrial, into the more techno, and back and forth for a while. This was the the industrial part of what I thought was a pretty defining suite off my first computer based album. A nod to my dirtier days. Download: Noggin – 09 The Weather is Changing pt II (right click and choose ‘save as’)
This whole album has to make it up here eventually.
Epic dream house from the days when Robert Miles ruled the radio and the clubs. In my more wiser hindsight, I imagine this track sounds much better screwed. Hmmm maybe I can get two posts out of this… Download: Noggin – 10 Rainfall (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Naw, yall have been so nice to me I’ll just go ahead and include both…you be the judge.
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