Here’s a remix of the spoken word piece, Notes. Lots of crazy sounds. I’m having a great time with Ableton Live.

Notes (Tweeker Remix) by Chilljam is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at chilljam.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://chilljam.com.

This is a recording of me learning a new instrument. I purchased a copy of Ableton Live to play around with and as soon as I learned the where the gas pedal was, I went ahead and turned “record” on and this is what happened.

I love mad scientist experiments. I feel like I just created a monster.

Jumpstart by Chilljam is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at chilljam.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://chilljam.com.

This one is a strange novelty I was playing around with. The entire piece is done only using the text-to-voice features built into Mac computers. No additional effects were used.

The Mouse by Chilljam is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at chilljam.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://chilljam.com.

A Rube Goldberg machine is a deliberately over engineered machine that performs a very simple task in a very complex fashion, usually including a chain reaction.

Rube Goldberg Machine by Chilljam is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at chilljam.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://chilljam.com.

Binary Anatomy. Another experiment in electronic music.

Binary Anatomy by Chilljam is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at chilljam.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://chilljam.com.

Kill Monkey Mountain from Matt Cain.

Kill Monkey Mountain by Chilljam is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at chilljam.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://chilljam.com.

Here’s another free album download, Haywire Transmission.
Haywire Transmission is a collection of electronically written pieces that I was working on before I joined the chilljam.com project. After the dissolution of my previous band, Stars Burn Out, I needed to find a new creative outlet. I didn’t really know any other musicians that were available and accessible. So I picked up a copy of FL Studio and started playing around with writing music with my computer for the first time.
When I joined chilljam.com, I found ways of layering these song parts in a manner so that I could trigger them in our improvisational environment. Many of our earliest sessions involved quite a few of these songs, however, we were not regularly recording during that time so many of those original jams are lost to time.

To download the album:
1 Go to the Haywire Transmission Listen :: Album page.
2 Scroll down past the player and you’ll see a link labelled “Download this Album”.
3 Simply click on this link and the album is yours, complete with the album artwork.

Thank you to everyone for your continued support and interest!

Haywire Transmission by Chilljam is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at chilljam.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://chilljam.com.

Street Corner is something I was putting together for the film we’ve been working on.
We’ve hit some delay with the film production but I thought we could go ahead and release the track anyway as a separate release.

“Minimal” is the word here.

I was shooting for something with a dark, quiet mood without being drawing too much attention. Something that could work a feeling in the background without interfering too much with the visuals that would be showing on the screen.

Additionally, I was a bit influenced by the minimalist drum lines of some of the more recent R&B. I noticed that a lot of recent R&B songs have incredibly simplistic drum beats, relying primarily on isolated bass and snare strikes to hold everything together.

It was just interesting to see what could be done with some of the most simple layering that I could think of, relying on the space between strikes to give it breathing room.

Give it a listen. Thanks!

Street Corner by Chilljam.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at chilljam.com.

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I watched a hilarious movie called, Super High Me. The basis of the movie is that a comedian goes 30 days in row without smoking any marijuana. Then after experiencing 30 days sober, he smokes constantly for 30 straight days in a row.
In one of the scenes, the comedian has to undergo a memory test in which he is given 3 words at the beginning of the test that he needs to remember by the end of the session. While sober, he has trouble remembering the words by the end of the session, so during the period in which he smokes, he’s obsessed with the 3 words, cucumber, wire, and boat.
This was a hilarious scene and I just liked the words “cucumber”, “wire” and “boat” together. It sounded like an interesting surrealistic idea to start off writing a song with. So after the film, I wrote down these words quickly to describe a little surrealistic scene of the “Cucumber Wire Boat”.
Jeremy happened to have just written the music so when we got together that Sunday, I just ad-libbed the words I’d written over his production work.

An olive firecracker goes off, blends everything together in rainbows.
Just shine down in a mountain of water.
It’s all flowing down because gravity pulls.
It’s calling all of us together.

Can I whisper in your ear?
I think you can hear me.
I think we’ll sail far away in this vessel.
It’s pulling in, it’s pushing out with the waves.
Breathing in and out for all of us.
It’s organic.
It’s fluid and it’s alive.

Cucumber Wire Boat by chilljam.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at chilljam.com.

Reinvent Ourselves actually started lyrically from two different scraps of writings that I had.

The first part, I was obviously in a really dark mood and started framing an almost dystopian kind of situation. I guess the idea of a police state or a warlike situation was in my mind at the time. I wasn’t really quite sure where to take it after the first couple of lines, however, and just left it the way it was in my notepad to revisit at some other time.

The second part of the song was drastically different, focusing on brighter days. The idea of escaping from an unhappy situation and “getting away” to someplace nicer and more enjoyable.

When Beavis, Jeremy and I got together the following Sunday, Jeremy had written the base music production for us to work from and I noticed how drastically the music changed as it progressed, especially with the introduction of the deep bass line about halfway through. Beavis laid down some sweet guitar to bootstrap a lot of the sound together in a tighter fashion and I started playing around with using some of these lyrics and noticed that the two scripts actually went together in a story-like fashion so I went with it.

Like ghosts we shimmer in the darkness, rolling the dice to make our next move.
Foreign sentries haunt us, shadowing each step.
You can hear the howling in the distance.
Tracking each of us and taking the weak.

Each criss-cross street I cross is telling me to get out.

It’s simple. If you take my hand we’ll leave this place and reinvent ourselves.

We could be anything.
All your dreams, all your potential, it’s possible.
Everything’s possible.

Believe in everything and it just might come out the way you imagined.
Everyone’s got to start somewhere and we’re starting out here, right now.

Just take a breath and jump.

Reinvent Ourselves by chilljam.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at chilljam.com.