Carnival of Nescience
By WHATISLOSTINTHEMINES
what
Bandcamp
whats-this-thing-here
SoundCloud.
Cover art by genericDragon
genericdragon
Tumblr.
Released 12/8/2017.
Duration: 2:05.
Listen on Bandcamp or YouTube.
Read artist commentary.
Tracks that Carnival of Nescience references:
Artist commentary:
Gosh, I started this song way back in March, when I was starting to get some dim idea of how the fuck music works. At the time, when I was tossing around ideas for what a theme for LOTAM might sound like, I happened to keep going back to the same thing. Magical stoner guitar, baby. Zilly as it must sound, I thought it would make for a neat song. Entreated by this concept, I started work. Enter me doing something a little more different from what I made at the time.
Issue: I needed to shoehorn in an ICP reference.
Solution: I would ask Cait for an ICP clip to shoehorn in, which she assisted by sending me clips of Miracles that were flanged beyond belief, thanks.
After adding on several horn samples over an actual clip, I automated the tempo, so I could have a lurching vibe to that section, and I could get started on the song proper.
Basically, I wanted to create something that had a slight uneasy vibe to it, but was otherwise an easy listen. As it happened, I thought guitars run through many, many flangers would be a nice way of achieving that. Doped up sounding instruments would sound fairly not-high-Gamzee-y, I thought.
Can't say I had much of a plan beyond that. Hate to plan out absolutely everything in advance to be quite honest. As I first added drums, I thought of using noise channels, but was too lazy to actually find good settings, so I bit-crushed normal sounding drums as a placeholder. Rather than change it later on however, I found that the drums already worked quite well as normal fucking drums, so I kept them as is. After that, I added a synth arpeggiation, which much much later at the suggestion of SplitSuns I put an automated pitchbend over, which might be a little hard to hear in the final mix, but eh. Can't particularly say anything that more interesting about the production. That about wraps it I'd say. Even though this song is fairly old by now, I'm still fairly happy with it. Rather works well for the subject matter, not to toot my own horn.
This piece was a bit of a challenge for me, since landscapes aren't really my strong suit. This was also my first contribution to unofficialmspafans. To me, the song had a kind of dreamy, hazy feel to it, and I tried to reflect that the best I could in the artwork. LOTAM is an interesting land, and I had a lot of fun drawing this. I hope that you guys will all enjoy this song as much as I did!