Category: Soundworlds: DigiChip Academy + COLOURSHARDS
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futurejack experimental #4 – SKYDRUM
— Workflow Insights I. I was actually creating this track at the same time as SKYREST, both essentially remixes of Futurejack #2. Whereas SKYREST went in the ambient direction, this one went for a heavier drum-breakdown direction. II. The drum beat included several layers of light percussion, some not all that audible. This is aiming…
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futurejack experimental #2 – SKYMIST
— Workflow Insights I. After starting out the track in a similar way as the previous one, I cut up the drum loop from the first one and re-arranged it. II. I used a Voxglitch sampler within Cardinal to trigger the intro of Cloudstorm City via MIDI, passing it through some waveshaping as well. III.…
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futurejack experimental #1
— Workflow Insights I. Cutting up, layering, and re-arranging portions of my previous tracks. The central melody of this track (and the rest of the Futurejack Experimental ones) comes from a portion of The Grassworks – a favourite track of mine. II. I ended up building out a drum loop with these cuts, and decided…
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an idea
— Workflow Insights I. This track (and what hopes to be an album) was inspired by albums in the Plunderphonics genre. The difference here is that I am pulling from my own Public Domain music, so no clearance needed 🙂 II. I often don’t use compressors or limiters (despite what is often call best practices).…
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DISCOVERY SQUAD
The Interstellar Peace Federation’s newly formed Discovery Squad is a four-person team, specialized in finding and documenting discoveries around The Weave. Partially inspired by the grassroots Threadwalkers movement a century ago, the theory is that as the public appreciates more cultural works of other nations, it builds more incentives for *not* going to war. Our…
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Disc II
I stand quietly in the corner of Hub A1, keeping out of the way of the entrance class introduction. It’s hard to believe it’s been thirteen years since I was in these azure halls, overlooking this polychromatic island. I was almost halfway through my studies when I came across the Cruise Diaries of Aster Delfin…
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Central Cafe
The compass-shaped Central Cafe sits as a middle hub of Academy Island. A favourite hangout for students, it wafts with the aroma of freshly ground coffee beans. The cafe operates on a day-night cycle, bustling from 05:00 to 17:00, then flipping to a relaxed Third Place for the next twelve hours. Saturdays and Sundays host…
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VS Leaf Professor
The Leaf Professor stands waiting, deep inside a campus of glasshouses. Orange leaves cascade onto a village of mechatronic plantlife, all of which are wistfully rotating limbs of pseudo-solar-panel to follow electromagnetic waves rather than photosynthesis. The EM waves Morse out of matrices of vectorized wall-emitters. Mostly invisible, I can see the faintest of fuchsia…
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VS Data Professor
Binary rain streams around the digital radar dish that we are using as an arena. Enter the HoloNet. Professor Eleizer has modded an old chatroom into this, and modded his avatar into an angelic cyber, far beyond human recognition. His Prime Character, Hexadecimeleon, lizards out from a portal of artifacting glitch-textures, packet data sliced up…
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Midnight Plasma Pipeline
An enormous pipeline twins out from the back of DigiChip Monastery. I hadn’t had time to discover it the first time I was here. I had just met another student, Telon, who has insomnia more chronic than my own, and we decided that midnight exploring was better than not-sleeping. Thick monitoring windows forged into huge…
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Data Lab
In the game of DigiChip, Data is the element of everything digital. A converted planetarium on the rocky Western Beach houses the Data Lab. Its interior dome no longer dotted with stars of night sky. These days, digital beings and structures manifold – entire worlds transform across in holofield curvature. I slow my way through…
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The Grassworks
The Grassworks is a lush green plain, populated with the mossy silhouttes of mech-frame ruins. Weather Drones sail about the sky, weaving atmospheric rain for most of the year. Wading the field is a breath of respite from a strange past. Originally called the Robotworks Lab, a decades-former student created the Weather Drone experiment, planning…
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VS Thunderbolt Professor
Professor Hildr Raystrom welcomes me to her pitch dark arena. My eyes trace the dimly lit outline of her outstretched hand, up brace-wrapped arm, and to the huge thundercoil looming behind her. With a sudden snap of her fingers, blue and fuchsia lightning bolts scream out from the coil and into electrogenerators, previously cloaked in…
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DigiChip Duel
Nothing else matches the feeling. DigiChip duelists spend their lives forging and reforging their Decks – as expressions of their personality, and as tools of the trade in the world’s biggest sport. Elemental synergies. Metagame strategies. Diffusion, diversion, and disarmament techniques. We study for years outside of the game, but we learn most on the…
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Roadtrip
Henry was my best friend growing up. He’s the one who pushed me to come to DigiChip Academy to develop my craft. I remember our last roadtrip, cutting through the mountains cradling our town, magcycling out to Menna Coast. Along the long road, we chatted. I wanted to run away from the family shop. It…
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Thunderbolt Lab
White-plate walls and pulsing neon lightlines frame the interconnected rooms of the Thunderbolt Lab. Students here are specialized in the Electric Element, which is reflected in the way they jolt between tapping experiments into computer consoles and observing results arc outward from desk-bolted coils. Thunderbolt students duel with Decks that start slow and charge up…
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DigiChip Monastery
There are eight railrider lines in eight elemental biome directions. I happen upon a lonely ninth line: north-north-west goes to DigiChip Monastery. Lining the hall of the monastery are huge statues of history’s DigiChip Champions, bathed in sunset that streams through circular skylights. Monks of all ages and body types dot the hall, silently cleaning…
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Component Workshop
Phalde must be in his late fifties, is built like brick wall, and has a streak dyed of turquoise through his graying hair and beard. I’m told he can be seen hammering away at many of the machinations throughout Academy Island, but in the Component Workshop he is most happy. Funnily enough, customizing the Components…
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Starter Deck
“Welcome to DigiChip Academy!” I don’t think I’ve ever been as excited as I am now, being welcomed by the hologram of the Academy’s virtual raccoon mascot, RC-0N. I can’t hide my smile. DigiChips have been my life, and my mother’s before me. We run a small DigiChip shop on the edge of our town,…
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CSTMSHOP
I took a large break from the album between the previous track and this. Reading about Immanence ignited a curiosity for making music that was more upbeat and danceable, and CSTMSHOP was the first step in this direction. MechSounds was a lot more established by this point, and so I was able to use samples…
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Megasun Horizon
Data-bending is the quite cool technique of converting data of one file type into audio. Mentioned in a recent interview with Djrum, the technique is much older, with its roots in circuit-bending. As it turns out, Audacity is the go-to tool for importing any file into raw audio waveforms, and Gimp’s fractal tools work well…
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A Midnight Fire
_software: OpenMPT_download: 01-AMidnightFire.wav_project-files: 01-AMidnightFire-SOURCE.zip_samples-used: MechSounds_license: public-domain / cc0…
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NET-CON-01
This is one of the first tracks I made using OpenMPT, which I found to be a great successor to Furnace Tracker in terms of allowing deeper mixing, and straightforward sample playback. By this stage, I had finally gotten over my fear of Windows-95-looking software, and realized that it could actually be very robust. It…
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RCVRBOOT
One of the tricky limitations of tracker-based DAWs is that the structure disincentivizes entering chords, when compared to a piano roll. For single-voice instruments, it excels. I am constantly inspired by the layered-chord atmospheres of The 1975, and wanted to, at least, use chords with more than 3 notes in this piece. This is certainly…
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TPE-BOY-02
I must admit that, while I like how this track turned out, I don’t think it fits the aesthetic of the album. It was intended to express a handheld tape recorder, but in retrospect this aesthetic diverged from the handheld game console “options menu” type theme. Moving forwards, I will try not to consider a…
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MSG-PAL-98-MkII
Inspired by the resurgence in 90s Jungle music, and the drumming that emulates it, I wanted to use this as an opportunity to get better at drum programming. MSG-PAL-98-MkII is a remix of the first one, and despite its “chill” influences, it ended up staying quite bubbly. I tried to keep all sounds quite short…
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MSG-PAL-98
Held in hand Digital heartCraft to guide toward creative lightForget the followsForget the fightsThese designs are not just toysMachines are meant to Spark Joy. — _software: furnace-tracker_download: MSG-PAL-98.wav_project-files: MSG-PAL-98-SOURCE.zip_samples-used: MechSounds_license: public-domain / cc0 …
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SAVESTRM
CSound is synthesis programming language, like SuperCollider, but is more designed for exporting WAVs, rather than livecoding. This made it an interesting tool to explore in the context of this album’s resampling. In retrospect, this track could have used a little more variation in the repeating chords, but as a simple wind-swept and reflective piece,…
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DFRGAUTO
There is something about the mysterious night-time atmosphere of media like Out of Order, which creates a sense of positive intrigue. This works particular well in absurdist narratives. The concept behind FOUNDCARTRIDGE04 is of being a mysterious GBA cartridge found, and each track name a digital tool found on that cartridge. DefragmentAuto, or DFRGAUTO, is…
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DISKEDIT
By the point of starting this album, it was clear that Game Boy Advance soundtracks combine many of the elements that resonate with me: 90s synthesis, resampling that synthesis, and a tracker-based workflow. Fortunately Furnace Tracker includes the GBA MinMod chip to recreate this workflow. Using Vital (in FL Studio) to generate and export synthesized…