In my own history of musicmaking and production, Leanderesque represents the single most conspicuous evolutionary jump I made. The complexity of composition (fugue-like, though I didn't know what a fugue was at the time) and production (fast, detailed, inspired by Aphex Twin's Drukqs album) became the baseline for the kind of thing I'd go on to do as Aeriae. Doing this track mobilised me to work out what it was I actually wanted to do.
Back in 2005 when I did Leanderesque, a retake of the Leander 'Shop Song' by Tim Wright for Amiga game Leander, I had no money for proper DAW software, so I made the track using Music 2000 on my sister's PlayStation console. Without more software or equipment, I couldn't get a good (read - without a huge noise floor) analogue dump of the track out of the machine.
Realising that Music 2000 also existed for PCs, of which I had one, I bought the PC version of the program with the mad idea to re-enter Leanderesque note by note and render it directly to disk, thus skipping the analogue stage.
I went ahead and sat the PSX and TV beside the PC monitor, copying every single note event and effect across one at a time between the two programs. It was agonisingly painful and took weeks.
I eventually stuck the rendered pieces of audio together in a free intro-copy of Protools on my Mac. The PC track sounded a little different from the PSX version (especially the reverb, which was definitely not as good) but overall, it was pretty close to the original, and to me it was just a triumph to have got the song into a file.
When I submitted this to OverClocked ReMix, they unanimously described it as pretty much the worst thing ever, and rejected it. I was surprised, given how well my previous submission, Proxima Path, had been received. In retrospect, this was a discrete moment in life when I realised the importance of pursuing your own aesthetic and not paying attention to people who don't understand it.
Five years later I had the equipment and software necessary to collect a good recording of the original PSX version of the track. In this mini album, 'Leanderesques', I present the original PSX-made version first and then the PC-made version.
credits
released February 9, 2015
Produced by Wade Clarke. Original track by Tim Wright.
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