Free Music! Get Your Free Music Here!
Back in the last millennium I used to spend much of my free time messing about with programs like Cubase and Sound Forge and a selection of analog synth emulators, making agglomerations of sound that could, loosely, be termed music. Making bleepy music is, in fact, what first got me into computers*, and it was ace fun, but I got out of the habit after I started sharing accommodation with human beings whose tastes did not encompass listening to fragments of amateurish breakbeat-based instrumental electronica over and over and over again.
Earlier today, however, I was pleased to rediscover a stack of old CD-Rs containing a multi-volume zip archive from the old Windows 95 PC upon which I composed my masterpieces. For your listening pleasure, then, here are four tracks that I have managed to salvage from the depths of history:
If you’re insane and want to download them all to save somewhere, here’s a .zip with all the tracks in it, and some cover art that I knocked up so you won’t get a [?] in Cover Flow.
If nothing else, you can pride yourself on being about as indie as it gets whilst still listening to recorded sounds, because there’s no way this stuff would ever get an actual release on any self-respecting record label. The great thing about the internet is that instead of having to spend ages recording loads of cassette tapes to give to people, I can now just upload a few files and instantly share my music with my entire audience, yes, that’s right, both of you, and you’d better listen to it all or I’ll be deeply offended.
Should you wish to offer any criticism, please bear in mind that a) I’m fully aware of all the limitations of my compositional abilities, thanks, that’s why I gave up when I was 23, and b) I wrote this stuff on a computer with considerably less processing power and memory than my current mobile phone. Strictly between you and me, though, I’m quite pleased with how tolerably competent they sound after all these years.
* I actually started out on OS 8 Macs at my sixth-form college, and, as I recall it, moving over to the more affordable Windows-based PC version of Cubase was almost physically painful. Win95 crashed a lot when you used it for making music.