NaSoAlMo 2005

acb's album attempt

In November of 2005, Your Humble Narrator participated in National Solo Album Month, a challenge to produce a solo album, of no less than 29 minutes and 6 seconds in length, within one month.

This year, he was successful (well, to an extent). And the fruit of this labour is below:

Cover artwork

This album clocks in at just under 30 minutes. Some tracks are in need of further work, but it's a NaSoAlMo album, so that is to be expected.

The tracks:

  1. Theme From Super Summer Sound Spectacular.
  2. Disco Biscuits. A piece of Rapture/LCD Soundsystem-style punk house, with a touch of ironic metal. One for the people in the trucker hats.
  3. November Skies. Started off with a piano melody built on 7th chords and then goes into acid-jazz/trip-hop territory. Not too far away from Belle & Sebastian or The Smiths.
  4. The Space Between. A trance/ambient/electronica track; this came from running a Virtual Guitarist chord pattern through the CamelSpace plug-in, and then taking it from there.
  5. NME Car1ing Symphony. In the style of various new-wave-revival bands; see if you can pick out the inspirations.
  6. Come On Home. Speaking of new-wave-revival bands, a Franz Ferdinand cover, done in a sort of Art of Noise/Teddy Riley/Max Tundra style. No, I can't sing, which is one of the reasons that the vocals were so heavily processed.
  7. LiveJournal Song. The last song I did, put together literally within the day before the end. Features the MacOS X speech synthesiser on vocals.

CD booklet artwork (300dpi JPEG) is here.

License:

Creative Commons License
This music free to share under a Creative Commons Music Sharing License.

Tools used in production

All tracks were produced on a PowerBook using Logic Express 7, in various locations in North and West London. Other software used included: Celemony Melodyne Uno, Native Instruments FM7, LinPlug RMIV, GarageBand Jam Packs 3 and 4, Audio Damage DubStation, Elemental Audio Inspector, Waldorf Attack and Steinberg Virtual Guitarist. Additionally, a Palm handheld running Bhajis Loops was used for jotting down ideas whilst on the go.

© acb 2005; some rights reserved. Quality may vary. Warning: some songs may contain backwards Satanic messages.