I have no idea, now, when I started making electronic music. The earliest stuff, still unreleased, was made with Audiomulch before it had any sequencing ability, then using loops made in JeskolaBUZZ fed into Audiomulch for somewhat greater degree of control. The first 'album' was released under the name Dependable Skeleton, which was what I got from putting my name into an online 'Wu Name Generator' that gave you your very own Wu Tang member name, on my netlabel Lucha Libre Recordings, which was actually the third iteration of LLR (the first being a tape label my friend Brady D (Slum Pianos Foundation) made in high school, second being a CDr and cassette label in the early 2000s). I remember playing a burned CD of this for my friends while we sat in the Fryn' Pan restaurant on Main Ave in Fargo, when it still had a smoking section, recruiting them to help name the tracks.
Dependable Skeleton - Making Math Not Music (2005)
At some point I was contacted by a band who requested that I not use the name Dependable Skeleton, so I switched to Lava-Proof Boots, after a comment by Adam M (Manchester Bulge, Magnetic Jihad, 2 Player Guess What, Bird Flu, GhostHandPunch) about how someone he knew was so contrary that if you tried to play 'The Floor Is Made of Lava' with her she would declare that she now had lava-proof boots. The first album under the name was Youthtronics, which was mostly written on BUZZ in the form of loops, exported to Audiomulch. Tracks were sequenced through the automation of volume controls and effects, then exported to CoolEditPro for EQing, stereo effects and 'mastering' of a sort.
Lava-Proof Boots - Youthtronics (2006)
At the same time that this was going on, Adam M and I formed 2 Player Guess What, which was named after a hangman-type game on an electronic toy computer. The writing process was very similar to Lava-Proof Boots at the time, although all the sequencing took place in BUZZ, relying on more tracker-style programming than on IDM-style digital signal processing (which was all over Youthtronics). The album More Songs About Animals, Bugs and Vans was released in 2006.
Around this time Jesse A (OKFox, USMilk, World Map Programmer) and John B (The Blue Fairy Godmothers, GhostHandPunch) and myself decided to make an mp3 CDr of 500 very short songs, 15 seconds each. We didn't reach the goal of 500 songs, but we did release the CDr (I think it had less than 400 songs total?). I wrote 101 tracks for my portion, which marks the last of the BUZZ/Audiomulch style tracks before moving to fully sample based tracker music.
At the same time as this and for a while after, Adam M and I worked on a follow-up 2 Player Guess What album, which was darker in sound and theme, focusing on sampled musical passages (as well as just drum breaks) and using film dialogue samples to convey meaning- I was very influenced by Bomb20 at the time, although the album doesn't sound anything like that. Although the album wasn't uploaded until 2009 to LLR, I believe it was finished closer to 2007. There were names for the tracks, but they were lost.
Sometime around 2007 I began writing music on Impulse Tracker on a Windows95 laptop, with an eye towards playing live, this new setup being more portable than a desktop computer. Initially I wanted to be like Venetian Snares, as did everyone at the time, but it wasn't possible to achieve the same level of chaos without exploring odd time signatures, and I was too novice at tracker programming to attempt it, so I fell more to the chiptune side, without actually adhering to the chiptune rules.
Micro Boots was originally intended to be released on microcassette, with a zine included, although it never was. The zine is designed but not printed, and the microcassettes have been sitting for nearly a decade now. Why not just finish it? Why not indeed.
The last LPB release, so far, is the Gutter Tape Breaks EP, which was originally released on floppy disk. At this point I wanted to use the lowest fidelity, grossest sounds I possibly could (which had kind of started on Micro Boots already). To that end I recorded all the drum samples I had onto tape on a tape recorder with an automatic volume adjusting circuit, then re-recorded them back into the laptop at a very low sample rate. By keeping the sounds incredibly lo-fi I would be able to fit more tracks onto 1.44 megabyte floppy disks, as well as sounding absolutely disgusting.
The song 'Love,' which I posted a video made by Yam Lynn for earlier on this blog, is one of many unreleased tracks made after the Gutter Tape Breaks EP.
