Title: Intentions Artist: Noggin Album: As Yet Unknown Date: 1999
Soaring, melodic, sophomoric, string-breaks. This is all Jeskola Buzz from when I was just starting out with this more electronic production. I felt real classy I after I spit this one out at 16. At 9 minutes long, this was an early epic.
Diggin on the primi-fun and the newfound favorite (at the time), Whitenoise’s Delta. Glide function on a synthesizer WOW. Download: Noggin – Intentions (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: Generations Artist: Noggin Album: As Yet Unknown Date: 1999
ReBirth made pure acid. Ten friggin minutes of tweakiness…this was my first real foray into the depths of the genre. You might recognise it from this post, which is actually the live/remix version of this original long-runner.
This one is relevant because in my current job writing code for iPad, I’ve rebirthed my interest in ReBirth…which has itself been rebirthed on iOS, and I imagine fits nicely into the iPad form factor.
Also, don’t forget, ReBirth is free software now (still one of the best 303 emulations I’ve heard). Download: Noggin-Generations (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: Meta-Pheta Artist: Scotty P ft. Noggin Album: As Yet Unknown Release Date: 1999
Request. Collaboration with my boy Scotty P, up in Montreal.
We shared a taste for industrial and harder stuff amongst our more strictly techno peers. This track is what Scott came up with after I sent him some guitar tracks. He really took it to the next level with this one…I just recorded these jams, and had no idea what to expect.
Claim to fame with this one too….anybody remember mp3.com? It was like a ‘indie’ itunes type place, way before iTunes existed, and they had charts and rankings of music, etc. We charted #2 in the Industrial Dance category which got us a lot of exposure. Not bad for kids just learning to drive. Download: Noggin vs ScottyP – MetaPheta (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.
Title: The Eclipse Artist: Noggin Album: As Yet Unknown, The Shoebox Release Date: 1999
Request Thursday! I must say thank you to all the new requests, and the new requestees, but do hold your horses as I had a couple in mind already and the key here is patience (aka dragging it out). Do keep those the requests and comments flowing. We’ve a long way to go yet.
I was very proud of this song when I produced it. It covered a few styles cleanly, and at least didn’t sound as much like ‘tracker music’ as I was thinking all my stuff did (in hindsight, my stuff rarely sounded like ‘tracker music’). I wrote this around the time of some great eclipse happening in Europe, and I really wanted to be there experiencing it. It happened for us Americans at night.
On a sidenote, I’m learning that my instincts on dating these things is often pretty wrong. For example, I originally thought this was from 2001. I thought I was in college, I thought I had ‘matured’ (musically) a bit, and then I thought, well wait, it’s still early sounding, maybe it was 2000. Looking at the txt file I wrote for the song, it was friggin August of 99. I was still 17.
Funfact: one of the machines in this song is named ‘pickles’.
This was “a Binary Distorsion Inc. / Alternative Rumblingz release”…originally at http://surf.to/bdi. I miss those guys. Download: Noggin – The Eclipse (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: Elevator World Artist: Noggin Album: As yet unknown Release Date: 1999
Sunday track.
I can’t even believe I’m putting this up here. I tried to make elevator music one time. General Midi is good at that. Here is my elevator music, which is just a remix of Another World. Download: elevatorworld (right click and choose ‘save as’)
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