Dagger of the Mind

Recently I discovered that one of the last two surviving CDs containing recordings of some of my music had become defective. I tried ripping the songs to my hard drive but no matter what I did it would always fail. Luckily the other copy still worked, but the problem there was that every song had annoying pops at the end.

With calculus destroying any chance at a social life, I needed something creative and satisfying to occupy what little free time remained, so refurbishing my old music seemed like it might be a fun project to take on. For example, one of the things that I had always envisioned was combining several of my songs into one epic track, and although the existing recordings don't match exactly what I had in mind, they're close enough that I figured I could at least approximate it.

One of the songs is called Dagger of the Mind, named for one of my favorite Star Trek episodes and the fact that it features a sample from it. Coincidentally, the ladies over at Look at his Butt just did a whole analysis of Dagger that is quite good. Check it out here. Anyway, I've managed to meld the two versions of that track into one long version, preceded by the Rebirth version of a song originally called Titan. Sadly, Titan has been lost, so I'm calling the Rebirth version Titan's Shadow, because it only hints at the original. Dagger of the Mind then transitions, as seamlessly as possible, into A Stream of Ionized Particles, for a nice, 25-minute-long track, Tangerine Dream style (um, good Tangerine Dream, I mean - not that embarassing post-1984 garbage).

As a bonus, though, I've taken some time and worked on a couple of more recent tracks. One was an original done in Rebirth, and the other is based on the tiny shreds - the microscopic filaments that a forensic detective might find - that remain of what was my favorite track out of all the songs I wrote. Luna was, I think, as good as a lot of Orbital's stuff, and if you understand that not only am I hypercritical of my own music, but that I worship the ground Orbital walks on, then you'll realize that I wouldn't say something like that lightly.

Unfortunately, through my own negligence Luna's MIDI sequence disappeared, as did the only cassette recording (not to mention that I sold all my gear to Mike, anyway).

The one tiny bit of luck in all this, though, is that I had managed to put Luna's melody into Rebirth (gotta love Rebirth!), and though the Rebirth version sounds almost nothing like the original, I did manage to turn it into a pretty cool track in its own right. I'd post a link to an mp3 of it, if I could only figure out a place that would be willing to host the file for free.

There are still a couple more things I want to do before I'll be totally happy, but the long and short of it is that I now have a whole bunch of new CDs of my stuff that this time I won't let go to waste!