welcome to elitefitrea.com
EP 2009 // download // buy
=rand()*1,000,000 was my first musical ‘accomplishment’, aside perhaps from the two or three things I made for the somethingawful forums (as if real people could care about that). I made it for the 2009 RPM Challenge.
I was so mortified by my tragic failure of a life that my intent at first was to make the most awful music imaginable. Using randomization, I hoped to create the very worst patterns with the most awful chords and melodies, and then use those to create deliberately horrible song structures.
I started working on the first track on February 7th, and after 10 minutes I had a strange, dorky beat. As I started fixing little problems and correcting notes it became much better, and before I knew it I was intentionally creating something very listenable. An hour had passed and I had finished programming Guarana. I thought that if I could repeat the same process a mere 8 or 9 times, I would succeed at a legitimate accomplishment, which was, of course, much preferable to my previous idea. I made 10 more songs using the same basic formula I used to make Guarana, using all ideas indiscriminately as they came, without trying to discern whether they were good or not.
tracklist
Frequent use of glitch programs helped to foster a random sound environment for enhanced decision-making. None of the album was preplanned, and each song is just 2 to three minutes long. The song titles are also named in an ad hoc fashion, taken from the ingredients of an energy drink I was enjoying at my day job in late February.
Each track took no longer than an hour to make from zero to finished product. By virtue of a few program quirks, some of the songs didn't even save properly, meaning that the mp3s are their only representation. Every idea was included, even the ones I hated, and as I showed them to friends and online strangers I found out firsthand what every musician eventually does: you really can't predict what people will like. The most random aspect of the album turned out to be the songs people picked as their favorite of the 10.
It's worth noting that I do not believe =rand()*1,000,000 is all that good, or even an accurate representation of my talents, but it is appropriate enough as an EP. I do think that some of the work is pretty cool, and, in its own way, says a bit of something about the state of the music industry. As it becomes easier and easier for people to make music in their own homes, will the industry embrace this artistic explosion or suppress it? Is it suppressing it now? Will more artists find sustainable means for themselves or will everyone drown in an anonymous sea?
A weird thing about =rand is that after putting the album on the RPM website, someone used my bank account to purchase a crapload of acai berry products. The purchases happened the very same day I uploaded the album to the RPM Challenge jukebox. So many of the tracks have the word 'acai' in them that this struck me as a malicious coincidence.
There's a hidden track on the CD I sent to RPM challenge. This song is not on the jukebox. I made it for my friend Nick, who was trying to film a B horror movie about telepathic aborted fetuses (ideas like this are pretty common with him). Since I made it during February it met the criteria for the challenge and I stuck it in there. But good luck getting that while I'm in prison. Incidentally, Nick rejected the song, citing that it was too "dance-y," and entirely too listenable.