This is Halloween season, it's appropriate to go into horror/goth territory. Here's a track inspired by the poem The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe.

It actually started with the slightly campy bass line. I then did an abbreviated version of the poem, and used vo.codes to generate appropriate reading of the text.

Adding some horror sound effects to finish everyone. This is a good training for what i've been working on with a friend: a re-imagining of Christmas traditional songs into dark gothic versions.

10 weeks to go!

I was watching the documentary about Billy Milligan, a criminal who allegedly had up to 24 personalities coming with his dissociative identity disorder. The documentary in itself is interesting but the soundtrack has really some great atmosphere and the banjo use in building a spooky vibe was really cool.

I then started on Saturday, took my guitar with a resonator from the wall. I have not heard enough banjo music to be able to catch the vibe of that kind of music but a couple of riffs appeared and i recorded them on my phone. Plugged that into FL studio, and started adding layers of drums, strings, static elements. Reused the Vintage Vocals sample pack from Splice (including samples of the Night of the Living Dead, which is now open source). And then added a couple of elements using the site to generate spoken voices by famous people (https://vo.codes/).

This kinda reminded me of David Lynch's Lost Highway, a great dark movie from the mid 90s. It has an awesome soundtrack (Barry Adamson! Angelo Badalamenti! Trent Reznor! David Bowie!) and has sections of free jazz with atonal saxophone. I went for more samples from splice, rearranged them and put layers here and there.

Here you go. I like the general moodiness of the track and the fact that the creation was really easy to go - it just flew with free association.

In the late 80s/early 90s, Tsui Hark became a very famous filmmaker in the West with the success of his Chinese Ghost Story movies. Mixing traditional Chinese atmosphere, humor, mysterious horror, and romance, they are classic, especially the first one. And fortunately, they are on some streaming services, at least where I live. Rediscovering the movies made me want to play around with the horror atmosphere and traditional Chinese instruments.

The strings are a Guzheng, using several note samples and getting them into Directwave. The drums are Japanese taikos. This is mixed with some violins samples, and xylophone and bells. The drums might be a bit too much for the mysterious vibe I was going after, and I am not satisfied with the melodies used for the Guzheng. I like how they feel strange and slightly eery, but I don't like that I was not able to reproduce the type of melodies that are typically played on a Guzheng. This sounds more like a weird piano played on a stringed instrument. But this is a step in the right direction.

Anyway, I had some fun making this track. :)