every week i answer some questions.

Julie asks:

Is there any chance that this new art work will appear on a T-Shirt!?
Please?

julie is referring to the new artwork for the free digital waterfalls ep, generously provided by wonderful melbourne artist and musician royce ng of brothersister records:

yeah. wow. royce did an abso-fucking-lutely amazing job with this artwork and i’m still a little bewildered as to how to repay him for it, but anyhow. i had this image as the background on my phone for about 12 months, in the lead up to putting the EP out. i still do actually.

i don’t have any immediate plans to make more t-shirts. they’re not cheap to get made and the last batch i made haven’t exactly flown out the door. so, yeah. wow, this answer is a bit of a downer, all of a sudden.

Ilah asks:

was wondering if u could solve a debate me and a friend are having..
that first track from chasing waterfalls, we both feel some kind of eerie familiarity with it. first thing i thort of was old skool platform gaming on the super nes or mega drive. he’s thinking something classical.
so erm, was there some kind of background to how u came to that tune, or did it just spoing straight outta ur head?

let me preface this answer by saying that ilah actually addressed me as “dr tim” when he asked this question, which infinitely multiplies the chance that i will answer it.

chasing waterfalls had a very very complex gestation process, it mutated in many ways over the 2 years it took me to finish it. i tried a lot of different melodies, a lot of different types of sounds and instruments, before it all kind of started to hang together in a way that satisfied me. so, i can’t really say that anything prompted the song as a whole, more that it is just the end result of a lot of very different influences. i could probably pinpoint what prompted me to use very specific sounds, but on a general level, every track that i make is very much just a melange of all the different musics that are going in and out of my ears at any time.

the computer game/chiptune element of it is definitely something people are noticing though. like anyone who grew up in the 80s/90s i spent some time playing these games so there’s an element of familiarity with that kind of game theme music. but also more recently, i’ve been getting interested in 8-bit producers, people who are doing interesting things with their nintendo DS, or reprogramming old computers like commodore 64s to make cool contemporary electronic music. someone i’m listening to heaps at the moment is eero johannes out of finland, who is making some of the most beautifully rendered chiptune-flavoured type stuff out there at the moment. synthesised funk.

but to be honest, i don’t get very involved with the actual practical side of this – i don’t actually reprogram my nintendo DS (don’t even have one), i don’t have a big .sid collection. i don’t own retro consoles or even mess around much with emulators. i don’t own any vintage synths. except for my dads DX7. i’m in awe of wacked out dudes like disasteradio outta NZ – who famously last year released a song on Atari cartridge – but i’m not a techie type guy. i just like some of those sounds.

its funny cos the part of the song that sounds the most ‘computer gamery’ – i actually was trying to create the sound of a steel drum but ended up with nintendo kinda sound instead. so its kind of like, half way between super mario theme and a caribbean steel drum! yeah.

oh, the classical vibe. surely your friend is picking up on the string section in the middle of the track, that was recorded live for me by my old-school friend jacob, who is a classically trained violinist. he wrote that part of the song and it matched perfectly into what i was already building. he has a background in classical music, but is also well-schooled in pop (he’s a huge nick cave fan actually).

so yeah. the word of the day today is MELANGE