Daniel Graves Joins The Project As Writer, Actor, & Musician; Sample Of Nondeterministic Blues Track!
almost 9 years ago – Mon, Nov 06, 2017 at 02:24:48 PM

Welcome back to Pieces, where a diverse team of a dozen storytellers is spreading across a thousand albums the stories of Americans during the Great American Apocalypse. Today we announce the addition of Daniel Graves to Pieces as a triple-treat: writer, actor, and musician.

Daniel Graves

Daniel is an industrial turned synthpop artist best known as the frontman of Aesthetic Perfection. As a lifelong Angelino, he'll be bringing a unique, very L.A. viewpoint to the album. On Pieces, he is not only writing and voicing an original tape, but also contributing an original Aesthetic Perfection track to the album within an album. This means there will be an Aesthetic Perfection track out there, set from the POV of a Daniel trapped inside the post-apocalyptic America, that you can only experience in snippets on the "radio" of Pieces copies! And then, backers at the $25 tier and above receive the track in full at the conclusion of uniques fulfillment.

Daniel returns to working with Spruke after contributing a voice performance to Music To Die Alone In Space To; unfortunately, of the 30-40 backers who chose Daniel's voice performance for their private copies, none chose to go public, so I can't link to a Daniel MTDAIST here. In lieu of such, please get excited by listening to some original Aesthetic Perfection.

Hear A Sample Of The Nondeterministic Blues Track

On Pieces, Spruke is focused on writing algorithms that create "nonderministic music", music which is different on every render of the album. He's not sticking to just electronic music, but trying to bring these techniques to other genres. Pieces features the first nondeterministic hip hop track, for example, with scrambled lyrics and rhymes across every copy; and the first nondeterministic rock riffs, with recombined guitar parts on every copy. Now, enjoy the first nondeterministically generated blues track! This will feature in a segment on track 2, "Pisces", of each unique copy of Pieces. The guitar and bass parts are randomly recombined and run through different amps on every copy.

These incredible guitar licks are recombined out of source material provided by guitarist Evan Lamb. The tape playing at the beginning is a sample of Ryan Kairalla's "Scoutmaster's Tape", in which a troop leader imparts precious survival advice to his scouts.

Sample of President Laura Bailey's Address & Video Chat With Collaborator Jeff Good
almost 9 years ago – Fri, Nov 03, 2017 at 10:59:48 PM

Welcome back to Pieces, where a diverse team of a dozen storytellers is spreading across a thousand albums the stories of Americans during the Great American Apocalypse. Today we have a real treat: a sample of algorithmically generated rock upon which is overlaid some salvaged cassette tape footage of President Laura Bailey.

Sample of President Bailey

The music has a number of nondeterministic elements. Every time this passage is exported, the drum-n-bass riff, synth bass line, and drum fills are algorithmically created anew. Coolest of all, the guitar and bass riffs are generated by an engine that was trained on dozens of other riffs and uses those to come up with new ones. Over it, you can hear somebody fast-forwarding through a recording of POTUS Bailey's address.

 Video FAQ Chat With Collaborator Jeff Good

Jeff "LowGuppy" Good is a collaborator who's done so much heavy lifting for this project that he's really more of a co-creator. He's responsible for all the gorgeous art you see throughout, and when this project funds, he's going back for another round plus some premium artists.

Pieces is admittedly a weird project and unique project that is hard to explain in an elevator pitch (unique albums? algorithmic music? distributed storytelling? album within an album? unique vinyls? wha?) and mediums such as the Kickstarter Pitch Video and Project Page Description really do work best if you can keep it brief. Here, Spruke and LowGuppy unwind and chat casually about the project in a format that lets them take their time and discuss every nook and cranny. If you had detailed questions about fulfillment, the details of tracks, the art, what unique albums means, they'll be answered in here.

 Onwards, everybody! The project is past the halfway mark and we're only a week in with two and a half weeks still to go. Let's do it!

Sample of, and Interview With, The Bloodies!
almost 9 years ago – Thu, Nov 02, 2017 at 11:51:45 AM

Pieces is coming along toward its goal! Over $7,000, and nearly 100 backers, and over 50 uniques are going to be created! This is all very exciting.

Today we're going to focus on contributors The Bloodies. The Bloodies are a grrl punk band from Minneapolis in the vein of The Misfits or The Clash. Their style is along the horror-punk axis, gross and grimy and ghouly, which works perfectly with this album's universe, since it's the dang apocalypse and horrifying things are happening everywhere.

Below, hear a sample of The Radio Engine, choosing first to tune to country, but then finding a pair of Bloodies tracks—"Nothing To Lose" and "Organ Donor"—before tuning into Colony's masterpiece "Tracer Signals".

Remember, backers at the $25 tier and above receive the complete Album Within An Album digitally at the conclusion of the entire project. So first, we get to enjoy these as mysterious pieces, only ever heard in glimpses like the above, on our unique copies, then sometime a year or two in the future we all get to rock out to them for real as full tracks.

An Interview With The Bloodies

Who are you? 

We’re the Bloodies: a punk band from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Bloody Holly brings the crooning vocals- you might describe her as a female Jim Morrison. Brian has been in the EDM and punk scenes for years down in Albuquerque before moving to Minneapolis and joining up with the Bloodies. Oxblood (Chelsea) on guitar has established a name for herself in the pop-punk scene in the twin cities, and Kimdracula (bass) has been playing for over 17 years in various originals and cover bands between New York and Minnesota.

How did Spruke and you meet?

The bass player has known Spruke her entire life... they’re siblings! [Kimdracula is my sister, yep!- ed.] The Bloodies had been playing together for about 3 months and had about 7 originals in the bag already before Spruke approached them. Writing a few more originals for the Spruke project hardly seemed like a large ask, and when the details came out about the scope of the project we couldn’t turn it down!

What qualifications do you bring to this project, and what's some cool stuff you've done in the past?

We’ve all been active in our respective music scenes for quite some time and have our own list of projects, accomplishments, and albums we’ve put out. But since the Bloodies are a fairly new project, Pieces will be our debut! We expect to have a full-length album of originals out for early next year and are already in the process of releasing a few singles from that album so expect a Bloody Deluge in the near future.

Do you have a unique point of view that comes through in your contribution?

Rebellion and an anti-establishment attitude are at the heart of the punk rock movement. If America collapses, you can bet this anarchist and counterculture movement will have a strong presence. I don’t think we can stress enough how inspired we are by the entirety of punk rock history: From the Clash and the Dead Kennedys in the 70s, to the darkwave and postpunk music of Siouxsie and the Banshees and Joy Division in the 80s, on to horrorpunk movement and the Misfits, and the feminist riot grrrls of Bikini Kill in the 90s: The punk movement has evolved to match the zeitgeist of the time. It continues to be the outlet for angry and disaffected youth, and the American apocalypse will be no exception. Hopefully you’ll detect the fury, melancholy, and sarcasm that defines punk rock on the tracks we contribute to the album within an album.

Like Music To Die Alone In Space To, I find working on such disturbing material incredibly therapeutic. Making depressing art, for me, doesn't cause me to wallow in my fears, but helps me deal with it by taking the horror from within and examining it under bright light where it isn't so scary. Did you find contributing to Pieces therapeutic? What other emotions did you feel while working on your Piece?

With everything going on in the world, these tracks didn’t really require a stretch of the imagination; in writing lyrics, an entire verse was taken from news headlines from today and just slightly exaggerated. Life imitates art, or so they say. Writing angry protest music, and then performing it and screaming your guts out for a recording is all pretty therapeutic. It amps up your energy and gives you a buzz you can’t come down from. If anything, recording these tracks was an exercise in restraint: when the blood was pumping and the adrenaline high, we had to go home and go to bed and ignore the fictional resentment we’d all just built up in ourselves!

Laura Bailey to Join The Album as President of the United States!
almost 9 years ago – Wed, Nov 01, 2017 at 03:34:53 PM

Welcome back to Pieces, the first project in history that's going to tell a distributed story by spreading passages across hundreds of distinct, uniquely recorded albums. We're almost half funded now! Exciting.

We're proud to announce today that one of the passages we'll be enjoying via "Distributed Storytelling" is the story of how the President Of The United States Of America handles the American Apocalypse, and we've hired Laura Bailey to portray the POTUS!

Laura Bailey

Laura brings the voice acting cred of hundreds and hundreds of roles to this project, best known amongst them: Dende and Trunks from Dragon Ball Z, Jaina Proudmoore from World of Warcraft and Hearthstone, Lust from Fullmetal Alchemist, Chun-Li from Street Fighter, Rayne from Bloodrayne, and the list goes on. Oh, another character Laura brought to life: the adrift astronaut from Music To Die Alone In Space To. Laura featured on the Andromeda copy of the album, as well as around forty personal unique copies.

MTDAIST backer FifthDream requested Laura on his personal copy, and later made it public. You can hear the kind of work that comes from Laura and Spruke working together, below.

Sample Of Ambient Music Being Made

Want to go inside the process and get a look at one of the many random synthesis techniques Spruke is building to ensure that the music is different on every copy of Pieces without manual oversight? Check out the below video.

There isn't just one way. For some passages, Spruke's written random chord generators; for others, he's built new kinds of samplers that can play back samples unpredictably; for others, he's made random rhythm generators, random loop samplers, "intelligent" lyrics rearrangers. And below, you'll see one particular technique. If you want to watch the whole thing to see the process, enjoy. If you want to just skip ahead to the payoff, go to around ~46-47 minutes.

Here's the summary of what I did here:

• Write a pattern that keeps some chords constant while varying the melody randomly.
• Choose an instrument and output that as a bounced mix.
• Repeat 16 times to create 16 instances of the same progression but with different melodies every time and in a different instrument every time.
• Create a sampler that chooses to randomly play back one passage on the left speaker and a different one on the right.
• Create a random crossfader that chooses to vary the volume of L and R. Make it move at a random rate so that sometimes they swap on and off quickly and sometimes slowly.
• Add delays that randomly vary their amount and reverbs that randomly vary their space.
• Add sudden jumps and cuts so that things can leap in and leap out.

This is just one of the many different approaches Spruke is taking on this album to writing passages that come out totally differently every time they're played back. We'll post more as the project continues!

An Interview With Contributor Darcie Little Badger & Sample Of Her Tape!
almost 9 years ago – Mon, Oct 30, 2017 at 08:06:08 AM

Welcome back to Pieces, the first project in history that's going to tell a distributed story by spreading passages across hundreds of distinct, uniquely recorded albums. Today, we're going to focus on contributor Darcie Little Badger.

Sample of Darcie Little Badger's Piece

Here, we hear ambient music as the radio tunes between stations. It successfully finds Darcie Little Badger's broadcast of a Lipan Apache bulletin, while occasionally meandering to other stations.

So what, exactly, is going on here? That's the magic of Pieces. Every taste leaves you wanting to learn more. On a Unique Copy, the music will all be different, and your radio will tune differently and may uncover other parts of this broadcast, or the other stations.

An Interview With Darcie Little Badger

Let's talk to Darcie about how what it was like to contribute to Pieces.

Who are you?

Hóóyíí! I’m Dr. Darcie Little Badger, a Lipan Apache scientist and writer.

How did Spruke and you meet?

After the success of Spruke’s last project, Music To Die Alone In Space To, he asked backers to recommend new talent for Pieces. The awesome Jay Wolf linked him to my website, and the rest is history! Spruke and I discussed the project during a video call, and I was so excited by the themes and scope of Pieces, I had to contribute!

What qualifications do you bring to this project, and what's some cool stuff you've done in the past?

Since 2014, my short fiction and comics have been published in numerous venues, including Strange Horizons, POC Destroy Fantasy (Lightspeed Magazine), The Dark, Mythic Delirium, Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection Vol. 2, and Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time, and anthology of LGBT/two-spirit science fiction. I also have a PhD in oceanography and am the geologist for the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas!

Do you have a unique point of view that comes through in your contribution?

Aoo!

You probably never learned the history of my tribe. It’s not something that most schools want to teach. We are native to the Kuné Tsé region (commonly known as Northern Mexico and Southern Texas). Before Texas was a state, the Lipan Apache tribe had a strong, positive relationship with the settlers. We even surrounded their new cities to repel threats. In 1838, The Republic of Texas expressed its gratitude through the Treaty of Live Oak Point. It promised peace and friendship with my people.

Treaties mean nothing.

Texas became America’s 26th state in 1845. The US was not--has never been--interested in our friendship. Apache groups in Texas were subjected to Indian Removal. After the Civil War ended, the United States focused its souped-up military forces on us. It's incredible that any Lipan adult or child survived the cruel extermination.

Yet we did survive. We’re still here. Living. Thriving. Fighting to preserve our culture from the threat of American assimilation. For example, until 2015, in this “land of the free,” I could not practice my traditional religion. My tribe had to sue the federal government, a tedious nine-year battle that reached the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, in order to use eagle feathers in our ceremonies. My grandmother almost did not witness our victory. This summer, 2017, she held sacred feathers and smiled. It was among her last smiles on Earth.

That’s the perspective I bring to this project. For me and other Indigenous peoples, the American apocalypse started long ago. We survived it. Can we survive another?

I hope so!

How did you bring your own experiences to life while working on your contribution?

I drew from all aspects of my life—professional, personal, cultural—when I worked on my contribution. Expect to hear Lipan phrases, scientific factoids, traditional knowledge, and a dash of underworld stories in this one.

Like Music To Die Alone In Space To, I find working on such disturbing material incredibly therapeutic. Making depressing art, for me, doesn't cause me to wallow me in my fears, but helps me deal with it by taking the horror from within and examining it under bright light where it isn't so scary. Did you find contributing to Pieces therapeutic? What other emotions did you feel while working on your Piece?

As a child, I learned that the sun will die. During its last throes, solar heat will engulf the Earth. Since then, I’ve struggled to reconcile my love of life with its fragility and transience. I also fight to protect the most valuable thing in the universe—the living planet, including its diverse human component—with every numbered breath I take. As I contemplated a difficult and bleak world during my contribution to Pieces, I was inspired to give the next generations the best home possible. If that means resisting and defying forces of destruction, corruption, and evil, so be it! Bring it on, and play Pieces as my ambient action soundtrack.