i don't feel like i had a lot of time or inspiration to do much this week, but i wanted to play around with beepmap which is fl studio's image-to-sound synthesizer. it was a lot of fun to make some real chaotic stuff! if i had more time it would be nice to refine this some more, but alas, that's not how the week went.

also i guess my circle of 5ths plan was aborted by my last track... so we are gonna be in Eb all month.

RPM is over and i made an EP!!! yay!!! :D (https://dantealexander.bandcamp.com/album/house-for-broken-dolls)

i humbly submit this track i technically started last week but finished this week. which was for RPM. i learnt a lot! it was super fun! i will definitely do it again next year. this is the track i feel reflects a lot of what i was trying to do at the beginning of the month, but didn't quite know how yet.

it does have swearing in it again. sorry lol

we are probably back to very simple instrumentals for a while i am so tired :')

this is more or less a stopgap for record production month. an introductory track to my album that also happens to be in G (very loosely)... because, well. january's tracks were all in D. so i guess we are going backwards around the circle of fifths.

the text is from the long-term nuclear waste warning message suggested by sandia national laboratories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages

i found the geiger counter on battery. so that felt very appropriate to play with.

Please consider listening with headphones as there is some swearing in the lyrics. As previously, I would be happy to replace with a clean version if required by the moderators or site admins.

This one is super close to the edge on the weekly deadline. I actually started making an entirely different track at the start of the week, became frustrated with the process of the sound design for that track... recorded demo vocals for this one on an impulse since I had just finished writing them. Those are still the vocals in the track because I had no time to rerecord with my proper setup. I had originally hoped to do some kind of... screamed vocals which I could not hope to sing in the middle of the night on a school night.

SO MUCH tweaking I wish I could do, if not for the terms of the challenge. But for now, I'm pretty happy with the overall vibe, even if it's rough around the edges.

Though this is a song about chronic insomnia and the general (gestures vaguely) of the world right now, this has truly been a helpful challenge in allowing me to channel my sleepless nights into better things. :)

for record production month, i'm doing a house EP, because i wanted to do something with some restrictions, like... 'okay it's going to be 120bpm, you can only use 4 on the floor drums, and you should be able to dance to it'. i am not being very strict on the definition of 'house'. i know my stuff is gonna wind up being noisy and weird anyway, but it's the idea of starting from a stronger and simpler, more restricted foundation to give me the opportunity to rein it in a little.

i started this song and i was pretty excited! i downloaded one of those band in the box style phone apps to help me with writing a good chord sequence and having a sense of how it would sound in the arrangement, which helped massively in separating out the compositional and production process. i arranged the main parts, thinking. okay. this is good. i like it. but it is not Dante yet. it needs more STUFF. so then i did my usual nonsense on it and now it is like this.

i dont think any DAW file has made my computer take off like a jet engine than this one. i'm usually super lazy with my automations but this one absolutely needed it because of the amount of competing elements to juggle. but i'm excited, because the fact i am thinking about juggling them and not just attempting to shove them into one giant, inedible sandwich was exactly why i needed to do this.

i spent my entire weekend on this and it might legitimately be my favourite thing i've ever made. i may come to regret saying this once the listening fatigue wears off.

i wrote two things this week, which were both intended for this challenge. this one was the easiest to finish, so i went with it - it came out of finding a cool set of chords while writing my first idea and wanting to expand on it, and the rest came very naturally.

there is more polish i would want to do with more time, but i decided to leave it there so i had a chance of finishing my second track too, in the same week (i was hoping the second song would count for week 1, which i never completed cause i didn't realise the challenge started on january 1st 😂)

(ALSO: i never noticed but all three tracks so far start in the key of D. should i just keep writing songs in D for this challenge??? lmao)

i had a bad health week, which led me down the path of... writing an experimental choral piece about it. i wrote it as a 3-part harmony and then adlibbed some soprano bits as well. i honestly was not expecting to use voice AT ALL in this challenge, so that was i guess a pleasant surprise.

the fun part of writing super crunchy harmonies is that... i felt a lot less self-conscious about my voice. the less fun part is that i still had to sing those damn harmonies.

hello! first weekly song ever! ah! uploaded in a rush, for i must go on a trip tomorrow. (in fact immediately after posting i noticed the tail was SO long but i was in such a rush to upload that i forgot to save the audio file i edited. so. there is like a minute of silence at the end. but let's just call that part of the track :))

I have been mainlining DJMAX Respect V for like... the past month. I love the 90s/2000s tracks from earlier games that just sound SO obnoxious and of their time. I have no idea what subgenre this is other than "cheesy as all hell". But I had a ton of fun making it.

Future weeks will probably not be this dense or complicated... but then again, I like dense and complicated :D