I've been wanting to do this album for awhile: continuing with my recent trend of remastering older tracks, I've done exactly that again and remastered several tracks off my first album. these tracks are the titular ones worth saving (though i like how vaguely poetic the album title is). most of these are off my first solo album, from when i was only beginning to learn reaper as a daw. track 5 (winter mountains) is from my winter solstice album. track 6 (astrophobia) is an unreleased cut from my first album.

In a way, this is the album I wasn't confident enough to make and release when I did AlienSeedDarkWorld the first time. In another way, I'm glad that project and this one are two separate entities; they served different purposes for me at the when I made them, and they serve different purposes musically as well.

when the reformation happened, i love the idea that people were taking existing german/english drinking songs and folk melodies and slapping lyrics on them to reclaim and repurpose them. in this way, i've reclaimed these melodies/harmonies for myself, stripping them of anything religious and making them my own.

boy this was a whirlwind. i had some idea to do an oops-all-samples kinda project starting with the drum kits in the korg synth package on the switch. i wanted to do some glitchy kind of stuff, too - i’ve been inspired by breakmaster cylinder’s way of making music sound glitchy because it’s something i’d never have thought to try. the samples on the korg are all really solid. the dr. dre one cracks me up, it’s in a couple of my tracks.

for this album, i started with two design constraints: it had to be 170BPM, and it had to have dance-type drums (no hi hats!). i’d been listening to a lot of the helltaker OST and it has both of these things; i love that album but it’s so far from something i’d make that i wanted to push myself with these requirements and see where it took me.

early in the pandemic i grappled with and was inspired by the necromancer as a character surrounded by death but at peace - the mantra “death provides life” from both diablo 3 and darkseed 2 helped me find solace.

this album’s been a long time coming; I finished this one in october of 2021 but i’ve been noodling with it for almost eight months now. i’d had fire emblem on my mind, between three houses and heroes.

sacred stream was a fun album to work on. i’ve been having a lot of fun with the korg kiev synth on the nintendo korg synth package. the organic nature of the sweeping, morphing synth combined with simple drums and fairly sparse melodic elements made for really open tracks that are perfect listening for vibing or driving.

i’m very excited to use the scarlett 2i2 to get some guitars and bass on my future tracks. as for the music itself, i was most inspired by discovering the synth from the policenauts / metal gear solid 1 intro theme.

i had darkseed on my mind. as silly as those games are, the music is iconic to me; 90’s PC instrumentals from a midi file are something special.

the moment everything changed was when i got that bike in november of 2020. i called six or seven bike shops during the bike shortage and lucked into the mountain bike of my dreams that someone had returned only the day before.

this was a fun mini-project. i had ambitions for a longer album, but they were cut short by my computer breaking. i was able to salvage the hard drive but i lost all my VST’s. fortunately i had the foresight to render what i’d made to date

the music of phantasy star always created memories of laying on the off-white carpet in front of my 13” CRT television set. i kept with my style of tarnishing hymns and used several for the inspiration for these tracks.

this album was something about death. my friend and co-worker emily had just passed, a few days shy of turning 30. with the global COVID-19 pandemic only beginning, death was on my mind.

this album might be my favorite one, and it’s very special to me. i spent a lot of time at all the coffee shops in the montrose houston area, and i know a good number of witches did, too. this album was very much for them.

this album was a continuation from the ideas i’d had in the previous one. i wanted to try some new VST’s i’d gotten and do a vaporwave-style album. i got as far as the first three songs before falling into my usual style.

this project contains a lot of riffs i’d written during my times as a bassist, and the sound is very much inspired by the jam sessions that our drummer and i would share in the liquor-stained basement under our college dorm