geographyhorse

While I'm not gonna go courting blogs and stuff with past releases, I do commonly through them up on Instagram stories every now and then (especially if they're season specific). I'm also fairly active on Repost Exchange and I'll throw them up there as my newer releases start to go stale just to freshen things up a bit. Old songs still have their uses.

Here’s something that I’ve been messing with. It’s rough and unfinished and may probably remain that way. I’ve been going down a goth/ darkwave/ ebm/ witch house rabbit hole and am trying to dip my toes into writing something depressing that pulls from a number of “dark” genres. It may be one for the trash bin, but I figure I’ll let you guys hear it first. goth type thing.mp3

@john I’m totally heading Steve’s point about the Thom Yorke thing. There’s a something about the way that your chord progression and melody intersect. It’s like a deep voiced, cowboy Radiohead (in a good way). @Emily Quinn very good voice. Your performances have a weird, uncanny ability to draw the listener in. It’s captivating. @Steve Mueske I sent you my opinions via text. In short, it’s stupid good.

I've also been getting side chain crazy on a couple of experiments. Testing different instruments and patterns and side chaining them to filters and compression to see what is interesting and what sounds awful.

I poked it around the 300range. It sounds a little strange there, so I brought in a slightly wider band around 1700 to fill it out and that sounds a bit better. It's an interesting idea. I'm gonna have to fool around with it. Good call. It plays nice with the snaps as well.

I posted this on last Friday's post, but I've worked on it over the week and I think it's closer to where I think it belongs sonically.

Steve, Let's begin is fantastic. It reminds of something really detailed that Aphex Twin would've done. Fantastic stuff. Love the pad melodies and the interactive beat elements going on. There's so much detail, I can barely take it. I've heard the second one. It grew on me since the last time I heard it. The textures and reverb/delay treatments are interesting. It's got me curious thinking about it's further development. The Death of Love is up there with my favorites from you. Seriously F*cking Powerful!!! Please make this available on Bandcamp or something so I can add it to my collection.

Here's my logo and some photos.....

So, I'll start by saying that I am not a very social person. It takes a great deal of energy and effort to communicate with people both online and off, so obviously promotion is extremely difficult given that a huge a proponent of promotion is communication. With my last E.P.'s and Single, I utilized Instagrams tools and also starting using the music service Musosoup. I've had some growth with both releases. My Instagram following grew from around 350 to 720 or so. My Pandora, Apple Music and Spotify plays, listeners and followers all grew. And obviously SoundCloud continues to grow with monthly SoundCloud plays increasing from about 1,000 a month to over 5,000 a month over the past year. I've found Instagram stories to be fairly useful for engaging my current listeners while maintaining my social distance. I also utilize the Reels and will post from time to time. I hired a digital artist to design a logo and also had photos shot in September. I will probably do another photoshoot in late Spring and will have more digital art done for future releases. Having a semi-professional image seems to help with attracting blogs, playlist ads, Reels, Tik Toks, and influencers. Speaking of which, I've found that Musosoup to be much more useful than Submithub (etc.). It seems it isn't without risks as even though Musosoup itself is legit, not all of its users are so.... buyer beware I guess. Blog reviews etc. are not very useful for growing listeners. But... they are good for padding the EPK and attracting more influencers so I guess that's a thing. Most of them come with a playlist placement so there's that. Playlists are just well.... playlist ads. They up listener counts and occasionally net another follow. Getting a Reel or Tik Tok influencer does hardly nothing for gaining new followers, but influencers with high follower counts can pull in some money so, I was able to make the money I spent back for the first time ever. Instagram stories on influencers pages are completely useless (at least that was my experience). I've testing running Instagram ads both turning traffic towards my website and towards my Instagram account. In my experience, turning traffic towards your Instagram page nets better results. It doesn't seem all that useful at first. But, advertising to my own followers has netted the best results out of every playlist ad and blog post ever, so growing the Instagram page doesn't seem to be that bad of an idea. It's just slow and cumbersome. On the SoundCloud side of things, I cannot reccoment RepostExchange enough. It takes a long time to gain traction using it's free services, but give it time and it will work. I'm still working with baby numbers, but the meager growth I'm enjoying is nice given my difficulties. I will obviously work on being a bit more social and will continue to throw sh*t at the walls to see what works and what doesn't. I didn't go into this expecting it to be anything more than a hobby so knowing that someone out there is listening is it's own reward and I need to keep reminding myself of that every time I get myself down with life.

I’m at work, but I’ll share my experiences later this afternoon.

@john this song could be something. I particularly enjoy the melancholic chord progression. I think the "makes me sad, makes me sad" could possible be reworked into something more impactful. Nothing esoteric, but there's got to be a better choice of words to convey the same message with a bit more "flair". I put this together over the weekend and it was started Friday so it maybe counts. I stripped back all of my tendencies to run off in unexpected directions and simply tried to make a simple song who's only goal was to be nothing more than a song.

I’m gonna have to f*ck around more with delay modulations. That trail after her “here” was delicious. Hats off to your production skill.

Holy crap. That reverb tail. 👌 If you’d just allow me one teeny suggestion…. the low cello sound that comes in around 2:05 could be turned down just slightly.

This was sitting around on my hard drive since November. I think it's "mostly" done. It's one of my more experimental pieces and is an interpretation of the New Agey, Guided Meditation tapes you'd hear in the 70's and 80's, but with modern downtempo and lo-fi elements thrown in. I'm particularly fond of the wax cylinder sample and the fact that the chimes in the background during two of the verses mimics the melodic structure to anticipate and validate the sample. Let me know what you think or if it's even your thing....