Monday, November 17, 2014

Disco Twirl

Ah crap, I knew I forgot something.  I haven't actually been making a ton of music lately, because work stuff has been pretty crazy.  I've been posting more over at my Soundcloud, though, so if you want to see more of what I've been up to lately check that out.  Anyway, here's a nice little disco thing I did a while back for no reason.

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

The Butterfly Effect

From my album The Scientist, here's a cover I did of an old Love Button song.  The song predates the stupid movie by several years, just for what it's worth.

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Abandonment Dream - Orchestra

It's been way too damn long since I updated this thing, but I haven't been entirely idle.  Here's a new thing I'm working on for a film soundtrack.

http://www.danwarren.net/Podcast/Abandonment%20dream%20variation%203.mp3

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Megan Goes To Antarctica

Megan Cook won the awesome Rolex Our World Underwater Society scholarship to travel around the world and dive, and now she's working on a mini-doc to show off some of the amazing things she's done and footage she's captured.  My friend Pete Cowman pointed her to me when she needed some music for it, and I whipped together this quick and dirty little fakey classical thing.  It's big and bombastic and adventurous, which is fun to do, and let me dust off some of my cool orchestral sound banks.  It could use some polish, but it's still pretty neat.

http://www.danwarren.net/Podcast/Megan%20Goes%20To%20Antarctica.mp3


Friday, March 15, 2013

Cash Rules Everything Around Me - I butcher the Wu Tang Clan

http://www.danwarren.net/Podcast/C.R.E.A.M.mp3

So after a long absence, here's me doing something horrific.  The less said about it the better, I reckon.

Sunday, December 02, 2012

Rough Draft - Spanish Seagrass

Hey y'all.  I haven't posted anything in a while, so here's a thing.  This is a rough draft of a soundtrack I'm working on for another short nature video by Days Edge Productions, who by the way just won admission to The Most Interesting Academy.

This piece is for an as-yet unreleased video about seagrass on the Spanish island of Formantera, so it's supposed to sound kind of Spanish and beachy and underwatery at points.

http://www.danwarren.net/Podcast/Seagrass%205.mp3

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Great cover of one of my songs by Jason Withers


Jason Withers has just recorded an excellent cover of one of the songs off of my eternally-forthcoming album A Series of Tasteful Nudes.  The song is called Time Is Fire, and it's great to hear it sung by someone with such a good voice.


Video here!

Thanks, Jason!

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Song of the Semelparous

I'm traveling pretty much all of July and half of August, so I can't really record anything new right now.  That being the case, here's one off of The Scientist, Song of the Semelparous.

Saturday, June 09, 2012

Waiting/Birds

This is a proof of concept for something I've been thinking about: an album that's focused on the passage of time.  This is actually the first two tracks fading into each other, but I haven't yet decided whether that's how it will eventually go.

Monday, May 21, 2012

Backyard Naturalists

Neil Losin and Nathan Dappen commissioned me to do some soundtrack music for a short video for Backyard Naturalists, an organization that encourages kids to go outside and learn about nature.  The video is here:


As with pretty much everything Neil and Nate do, it looks fantastic!

Thursday, May 10, 2012

Baby Makin' Music

And now, for no good reason at all, about a minute and a half of babymaking music.  Not that a minute and a half is long enough, but you can loop it or something, I don't know.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Springtime

By request, here's my song about the wonders of nature.

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

For friends

Here's a song I've been playing around with for a while. It's basically just about friends, and how sometimes we don't sufficiently appreciate how much they contribute to our lives.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

State Of The Union, 2027

It's only a matter of time!

Thursday, January 05, 2012

Son of Strelka, Son of God Chapter 8 Instrumental

Here's the instrumental track for chapter 8 of Son of Strelka, Son of God, entitled "Restoration". Found sound by Jon Bernstein.

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Video for Son of Strelka, Son of God Chapter 5 - The Fall

Here's the video of Chapter 5, entitled "The Fall". The art was done by Matthew Rainwater, scratching and sound effects by EBA. Other music and story by me, assembled via hacked-up bits of Obama's autobiography. As always you can download the full album at sonofstrelka.com for free. Enjoy!

Saturday, December 17, 2011

Son of Strelka, Son of God Chapter 7 Instrumental

Here's an instrumental track of the Buddha chapter of Son of Strelka, Son of God. I also have some really cool news - there's a draft of the video for chapter 5 almost done! It's a series of pictures by artist Matthew Rainwater, and they're pretty damn cool if I do say so.

Tuesday, December 06, 2011

Rough Sketch - The Tank

The next sample-mangling project I'm working on is going to be based on astronaut memoirs, or at least that's the plan. What I'm presenting here is not part of that - it's just a fun little thing that's actually completely intact from the source material. I will chop it up and use it in the final product, but that process is only just beginning. It comes from a book called Almost Astronauts, which basically chronicles how badly female pilots got shafted by NASA in the early days. It's a great book, but it's also somewhat infuriating to hear how such amazing, completely qualified women were completely shut out of the early days of space exploration.

Anyway, this passage describes the isolation tank tests. For some odd reason it's written in the second person, which is actually pretty great for my purposes. I haven't really mangled the source material at all, I just threw it over a spacey organ track I had sitting around because I wanted to see how it sounded.

Monday, December 05, 2011

Rough Take - Oh, You Captain Of Industry!

Here's a rough take of a song I just finished writing. There are still some rough edges lyrically and it's a rough draft musically, but I think all the bits are more or less there. It wasn't really intended to be a political song, but I guess it kinda comes off that way. Ah well.

Monday, November 28, 2011

Son of Strelka, Son of God Chapter 6 Instrumental

Here's the instrumental for chapter 6. Fun anecdote: the primary percussion here is a darbuka slowed down, and at the end of each eight bars there's a loud "tick-boom-boom". That tick was a happy accident, and is actually my wedding ring hitting the rim.

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Son of Strelka, Son of God Chapter 5 Instrumental

Here's chapter 5, which was done with the help of awesome Atlanta DJ EBA.

Monday, November 21, 2011

Son of Strelka, Son of God Chapter 4 Instrumental


Here's chapter four. I want to give a shout out to my dear, departed cat Cheese for being the voice of the monster in this one. He liked to walk around the house yelling at the top of his lungs for no clear reason, and one afternoon I caught him on tape. Slowed down, his caterwauling sounds like some giant, horrible beast.

He was pretty much the best cat in history, and we miss him every day.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Son of Strelka, Son of God Chapter 3 Instrumental

Instrumental for Son of Strelka Chapter 3. I need to give a shout out to Thomas Anderson for just up and giving me a banjo for nor real reason other than the fact that he had a spare. The banjo features heavily in this chapter and chapter 9, and in my mind serves as a sort of tonal leitmotif that surrounds Stanley's interactions with his parents.

Friday, November 18, 2011

Son of Strelka, Son of God Chapter 2 Instrumental

I've been meaning to get back to posting these for a while, my apologies for the slow progress.

Tuesday, November 01, 2011

Interview with Anne Fiero on WKCR

As part of the Son of Strelka thing, I was lucky enough to be interviewed by some really great people. Here's one of my favorites: an interview with Anne Fiero at WKCR in New York. Unfortunately my cell phone cut out a few times, but I still think it's a really neat discussion. I'm reposting it here with Anne's permission. Thanks, Anne!

Sunday, September 04, 2011

Creation Instrumental

I've been meaning to start posting the instrumental tracks from Son of Strelka, Son of God for a while, and I've finally pulled my thumb out and started to do it. Here's chapter one. It was recorded in my living room using pots and pans and a drum set.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

More Internet Art for Son of Strelka, Son of God


Here's another bit of concept art from SA Forums user Everdraed, which is hilariously creepy.

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Internet art for Son of Strelka, Son of God


A couple of cool internet people have done various bits of art inspired by Son of Strelka, Son of God. Here's an alternate album cover, done by Something Awful goon smoMashup.

Thursday, July 07, 2011

It Always Happens

While we're on the subject of verbal cut-and-pastery, here's one of my favorites of my older attempts. This is a beat poem about a man whose weird kinks keep wrecking his relationships. It's assembled from bits and pieces of an old vocabulary-building record from (if I recall correctly) the 70's. I can't for the life of me remember where I jacked the drums from, which is a shame because they're great.

Wednesday, July 06, 2011

Son of Strelka, Son of God - Audio odyssey narrated by Barack Obama, full album zip file

Hey everybody. Here is the full album of Son of Strelka, Son of God as a direct download, and here's a torrent.

There are also a couple of Youtubes of animation in progress here:

Chapter 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Any38uNUelM

Chapter 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PfrDjk0wP4

Chapter 5
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6EmSnLIew4

Thanks to everybody who helped make this thing a thing, and to all the goons and friends who are spreading it around the internet! Enjoy, and feel free to share it far and wide!

Details:

The cover art is by Ainsley Seago, who also did the animatic (and eventually will do the animation) for chapter 1. I fudged it around a bit in photoshop, so blame the layout on me. The second chapter animation is being done by Adam Bozarth, who you can hear on the hilarious Left Handed Radio podcast. Most of the sounds you hear are either me or Obama, but there were also some key found sound contributions from Teresa Iglesias and Earwicker, as well as the frenetic skritching of the fabulous EBA, whose Shapeless Mass podcast is something you should absolutely check out. I also owe a shout-out to Matt Brandley, Ainsley Seago, and Teresa Iglesias for extensive comments on early drafts.

I’m now trying to find people to animate or at least illustrate the various chapters of the story. Chapters 1, 2, and 5 are already done, but there are at least six more to go. The rough drafts of the first two chapters have been shown at the Alamo Drafthouse’s open screen night, and have been very popular even in their unfinished state – I even won second place last time and got a free movie ticket (I now owe Bozarth half of a movie ticket). If anyone out there is interested in animating (or just illustrating) a chapter, let me know at dan.l.warren@gmail.com. You never know, you may also earn half of a movie ticket!

Chapter 1: Creation

Our hero’s name is Stanley, but he doesn't really show up until Chapter 3. Stanley’s father is the first proto-man, who fell as a fruit from the first tree. He found the world an empty and desolate place, so he climbed to the top of the tree and began creating animals and plants and whatnot just by speaking their names. He gets really excited about the process, and accidentally creates a monkey in thin air, which promptly plummets to his death. He realizes that he needs to be a little more thoughtful about this process, and finishes by creating many of the beautiful things in the world. Then he disappears.

Chapter 2: The Golden Age (with found sound by Teresa Iglesias)

This chapter tells of the rise of civilization. At the start there are only uncivilized tribes in the forest, but they begin to desire something more out of life. They move indoors and become increasingly sophisticated. Eventually they build cities and roads, and they become isolated by their own success.

Chapter 3: Son Of Strelka

Stanley is born. He is the son of the creator from chapter 1 and a human woman, and his village expected him to be some sort of savior. Instead, he looks freakish. He is covered in yellow hair and has a dog-like face. Not in some cute furry ^_^ anime way, though, he is a disturbing freak of nature. With the exception of his mother, the people of his village despise him. They also despise his mother for giving birth to a freak, so they are both forced to leave. They go their separate ways, and Stanley is left to wander the world alone, a deformed, orphaned child.

Chapter 4: The Decline

As the chapter starts, we see Stanley wandering the land. Months and years pass, and as Stanley grows up the world becomes increasingly violent and nasty. Finally war is declared, and tanks and troops begin marching through the cities of the world. Eventually the gods themselves come to earth and begin marching on all of the world's cities.

Stanley encounters an apocalyptic religious cult made up of children. They recognize him as having some sort of power, and try to get them to join their cause. Stanley demurs, and the children grow angry at him.

Chapter 5: The Fall (with scratchin’ and sound effects by EBA)

As Stanley stands there contemplating the children’s angry faces, the world splits open and blood pours out. A huge winged monster comes out of the crack in the earth and asks Stanley who he is. Stanley answers, and the monster goes off to generally wreak havoc on the landscape with all of the other gods. Shit continues to get real, and we see the oceans rise up and flood the landscape. Buildings fall, fire is everywhere. As part of this we see a truly gigantic turtle stomping skyscrapers to the ground and just generally fucking things up. As a result of all of this, many of the children are killed and others maimed. Dirty, injured refugees are everywhere. Stanley tries to ask the few remaining children what the hell is going on, but he realizes that they don’t really know much more than he does.

Chapter 6: The Turtle

Stanley goes to space to talk to the turtle that supports the world, who was one of the main participants in the destruction of the cities. The turtle is off-duty now, and is just chilling out at home. He’s taken his shell off, and is just sitting around wearing a wifebeater and a hat. He smokes and drinks constantly, and basically looks like someone’s cranky old grandfather. They sit and talk about the destruction of the world, and why the turtle participated. He tells Stanley that he took part in the apocalypse just out of a general love of destruction, and plus he kinda hated America for sending astronauts into his home (space), where all they can do is die and fall back to earth. Stanley realizes that the turtle isn’t going to be able to help him.

Chapter 7: The Buddha

Stanley and the turtle go to meet the Buddha to see if he can restore the world. Buddha is huge, fat, made of bronze, and is stuffed into a suit that is slightly too small for him. He has an office to match. He wears a cross around his neck, oddly enough. His manner is initially something like a used car salesman or overly phony politician, and he tries to make light of the situation. Stanley is not amused, and gets angry. Eventually it becomes clear that Buddha is actually incapable of restoring the world. Stanley is despondent but determined to fix the world somehow.

Chapter 8: Restoration (with found sound by Earwicker)

Stanley remembers his father’s power to create, and starts to wonder whether he has the same ability. He stands in a desolate and empty landscape. Initially he is hesitant to try creating anything for fear that he won’t do it right, but eventually he musters the courage and starts to talk and move slowly. He starts by creating the home he wishes he’d had as a child – a pretty little village by the ocean, surrounded by giant trees, populated by friendly and gentle people. He loves this vision and feels comforted by it.

He then begins to recite the names of the dead in an attempt to bring them back, and is surprised that it works. As soon as people come back into the world, though, the simplicity of his vision gives way to all of the complexities we associate with modern life – cities, cars, businesses, etc. The world becomes hectic and busy, but he is still pleased with what he has created.

Chapter 9: Son Of God

Stanley stands and watches the world he has created, waiting for his father. His father appears, and is much older and more frail than he was when he was last seen. His father is proud of him, and they have a short conversation about where Stanley found his faith. Stanley recalls the monkey from chapter 1, and jokingly says that he couldn’t possibly have screwed it up as badly as his father did. His father laughs and agrees. They talk more about who Stanley is and his role in the world, and spend the day together talking and joking. As Stanley is taking over his father’s godlike role in the world, his father begins to age and fade as his own power disappears. Stanley carries his father to bed, and at this point his father is very decrepit. As his final act, his father brings Stanley’s mother back. As Stanley and his mother laugh and embrace, the father crumbles into dust.

Stanley and his mother discuss his role in the world. Mom thinks that he’s still basically living out the story that his father laid out for him, while Stanley thinks that he now has the ability to determine his own destiny. Finally, Stanley lays his head on his mother’s lap and falls asleep. When he wakes up the next morning, the sun is shining and everything is beautiful.

Monday, May 30, 2011

Obama project chapter 7 - The Buddha

Here's a working draft of chapter 7 of Son of Strelka, Son of God. In this chapter Stanley meets the Buddha and asks him to intervene and restore the world to its pre-apocalypse state. Buddha initially tries to downplay the importance of what's happened, but eventually admits that he would help if he could but is unable to do anything.

Sunday, May 15, 2011

Obama Project Chapter 9 - Son Of God

Here's a draft of the last chapter of the Obama project. In this chapter Stanley is reunited with his father and assumes his role as a deity. His father dies, but as his final act returns Stanley's mother to him.

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Falling Down - Working Draft

Substance abuse, erectile dysfunction, and recidivism all set to a catchy surfer beat.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Faded Southern Bellhop - First Draft

This is my first stab at recording the second-to-the-last song to be recorded for the new album. The song tells the story of a former hair-metal musician or drag queen (and really what's the difference) whose days of glory have passed him by. He spends his days as a bellhop agonizing over his failures and his fading fame. It's a really upbeat song for all that, though. I'll probably redo the vocals, as I was having a bit of an allergy flareup when I recorded these, but all in all I'm happy with the direction it's going.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Jagadish Chandra Bose - new version

I first wrote this song for a silly contest where the goal was to write a song about a randomly chosen Wikipedia article. The article chosen for the contest was about this guy Jagadish Chandra Bose. He was an Indian scientist and sci-fi author who work in multiple disciplines including biology, physics, and archaeology. Sounds like a neat guy!

Anyway, it won the contest and now I'm re-recording it for the new album. I've basically redone everything from scratch, this time with real drums. It's not quite finished yet, but I feel like it's heading in the right direction.

Thursday, March 03, 2011

Sad piano instrumental

This is a rough take of a short piano instrumental I wrote about twenty years ago. Not much to say about it but I think it's purty.

Saturday, February 19, 2011

Obama project Chapter 8 - Restoration

Here's a first take on the music for Chapter 8 of the Obama Project. In this chapter, our hero Stanley realizes that he has the same ability to create as his father, and decides to rebuild the post-apocalyptic world and resurrect all the people who were killed when the world ended. However, he finds himself unable to keep the story simple once people are involved.

Tuesday, February 08, 2011

Some spaghetti western music

This just sort of happened while I was trying to write some music for the seventh chapter of the Obama project. It really didn't fit the story, though, so I decided to nix it. It's kinda neat-sounding, though, so here it is. The intent was to change the melody up a bit more, but I basically abandoned it and moved on to something else before I got around to that.

Saturday, February 05, 2011

Obama project chapter 4 - The Decline

I've finally gotten words and music together for Chapter 4 of the Obama project. This chapter begins shortly after Stanley's mother leaves him. He spends a few years wandering the world, and sees that the world is a violent and unhappy place. Then he hears the sound of the horns and drums that mark the coming of the final war, and is confronted by a cult of children that are desperately trying to put the world back on track before it is destroyed. Stanley fails to take any action, though, and at the end is left standing there waiting for the world to end. In Chapter 5 (already posted), it does.