So, I thought I had lost this mix one day, but thank goodness I found it on my computer. This is unique in that the beat comes from my old casio keyboard that has preset drum loops with some auto-fills and different drum sounds I could alter when the beat is playing. I recorded a scratching sound on the synth at the same time the beat was playing, and then added several other layers with both the casio and synth.

Waluby by Chilljam is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Here’s an original recorded the same night as Come Together in the previous post. Be sure to turn you speakers all the way up, it’s a little quite. The extra sounds you hear are coming from Joe’s iPhone.

Come Again 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 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.

Working on some of the ideas for our most recent project has required a lot of focus on very dark progressions a lot of really heavy sounds. So, just as a light diversion, I wanted to write something a brighter and more lighthearted.

To be honest, I didn’t really start with any idea in particular. I’ve been listening to a lot of Faunt’s work lately and am enamored with their “video game”-style production sounds. I love how lighthearted everything sounds, even though their lyrical content may be focusing on some intense subject matter. It makes listening to a sad song a happy experience.

So basically, that’s where I started and I just played around the most lighthearted sounds I could find in my collection and just assembled them together in a fun way.

Primarily utilizing bouncy electro sounds, it has a lot of 8-bit video game type sounds in there and kept the heavy beats far away this time to just keep the whole thing lighthearted as a whole.

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

Over the last couple of weeks, things have been incredibly busy for us as we’ve just been getting over all the obligations life throws at us in the new year. Because of this, getting together to play in a simultaneously collaborative environment has been difficult. So, instead, we’ve been producing material individually. In as many cases as possible, we’re working on doing some asynchronous projects where we can each record aspects individually and then pass it along to the next person.

Thugs, right now, is just a lonely effort at the moment, but I wanted to post it up anyway. I imagine it may sound different if other members layer onto it and perhaps it would be interesting to post some of these songs as they go through each stage of development.

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

For something a little different this week, we played a bit over at Jeremy’s house and I brought my camera along to try taking some video of the band. We’re planning some future work with video and I wanted to capture some stuff while we were all playing.
I hadn’t really planning on keeping any of the audio along with the video, however, this particular video came across pretty decently so I thought it’d be a good one to share on the site.
Now, I don’t think we really planned on having any vocals while we played and didn’t set up anything to capture vocal work but I just felt like singing so I just pretty much sang/yelled as loud as I could control over the instruments. Surprisingly the mic picked it up ok and this is what we ended up with.
Hope everyone enjoys it.

Identity

I’ve been falling apart
Ever since you left me here
To waste away in rust
I used to know you
You used to love me
But you’ve moved on
It was bound to happen
A child is only called
until time says otherwise
And what we’re left with is faded tattered notes
About the way things used to be

It will all live on
I will live through this
And return to you when you’re done the day to day.
All of the things you used to love will still be there
Waiting for your return
Like your front door after the journey.

I know the days are long
You’re just trying to get by
Each day stretches on like
Rubber bands across and across
And across
Each Layer you peel like an onion
And yet another remains.

But the core is still there and the meaning still true
Don’t haunt yourself with concern for loss.
Just brighten the picture and focus the subject.
It’ll develop on the other side and you’ll
Find yourself still standing

It will all live on
I will live through this
And return to you when you’re done the day to day
All the things you used to love will still be there.
Waiting for your return
Like your front door after the journey.

Creepjacker starts abruptly with a crash of disjointed noise loosely connected for moments with syncronized stops. However, after some drunken chaos, the song finds it’s way into a lighthearted stroll underlined with distortion and tension.

A note a warning to listeners, Seahorse isn’t exactly a song; it’s a short collection of noise from one of our sessions.
The end result is a strange collection of saw-like reversed signal instruments in an open and non-rhythmic atmosphere. I found the sounds to be an interesting and complex arrangement of noise and just wanted to post it up as another example of the strange things that can come from our jam sessions.