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New T7ES song: I Have A DRAM (17 Jan 2011 at 17:27)
Apologies to those who are bored by obsession with primitive waveforms and their unusual composition. But the thing about obsession is that you gotta keep doing it, so on Martin Luther King Day we have a new T7ES song:

Cover illustration for T7ES - I Have A DRAM. DIP chip rendered in large pixels.
Tom 7 Entertainment System – I Have A DRAM


Nerds alone will get the joke, but did they know that Dynamic Random Access Memory was patented in the same year that MLK died? No, because nobody knows that stuff, not even Jeopardy-playing proto-Skynet futurebots. Anyway I Have A DRAM is pretty long at 3m50s, but it contains a lot of different ideas, mostly around its weird morse-code rhythm and conspicuous dissonance that seems to be pervasive in my click-tunes recently (the other thing about obsessions is that you get new ones). Dare I claim that I've mastered the minor second? Guess it's on to some microtonal shit.

Ludum Dare followup: My game "Disco? Very!" came in 18th place in the contest, which is pretty good. (There were 242 entries!) No medals, though. Next time. I ended up rating a lot of games over break—it's one of my favorite parts to see all the different ideas and also provide nurturing feedback—and there was some memorable stuff. My recommendations: Mother Robot had an inventive play mechanic and nice atmosphere. Grand Mystic Quest of Discovery was an impressively complete NES-like (NESque?) platformer. Time Pygmy is an "Achievement-Unlocked" style exploration game with outstanding graphics, which felt a lot to me like Maniac Mansion. Dry Voices is a mysterious platformer whose conceit is frankly too clever for the LD format (spoilers and my handmade map in the massive review I posted to the game). Dinosaur Dance-Off is absurd but compelling.
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Adhesion (cpe-69-205-69-21.rochester.res.rr.com) – 01.20.11 22:37:45
Nice, this is really enjoyable. The melodic work is really strong (especially the chorus, damn), and it's nice having that syncopated rhythm to ground the whole thing. Being (mostly) in 4/4 makes it a bit easier to get a hold of in the first couple listens too.

Oh, and your next challenge must be to master the 43-tone just intonation scale: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cKnTj2cyNQ
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Tom 7 (c-67-186-6-86.hsd1.pa.comcast.net) – 02.07.11 11:18:20
Thanks man! To be honest I don't know which part is the "chorus". :)

I can't believe I didn't know about Harry Partch. Love guys like that. On my long list of projects (but this one high enough that I believe I'll get to it) is to write my own software tracker that makes it easy to compose in microtonal scales and with irrational time signatures and stuff like that. I love Cakewalk but it has Western idioms baked into its core.
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Tom 7 (c-67-186-6-86.hsd1.pa.comcast.net) – 02.07.11 11:29:00
Also Beck's song "Harry Partch" gets completely amazing at the 4:30 minute mark.
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