WORLDS

I made a thing where I turned a thing I like into a shorter thing. Here's why.

May 17, 2015

TL;DR: I made a thing, have a listen:

You might have guessed from some hints in my previous blogs that I really like Worlds. If not, I'll just tell you right now: I really—no, I love Worlds, the album by Porter Robinson. And I'll be the first to tell you that I was surprised by that fact, because I don't like any of his other stuff.

I'm not a fan of traditional EDM or dance music, so the only reason this caught my eye was the fact that the first two singles "Sea of Voices" and "Sad Machine" did not sound like Porter Robinson's previous music (or traditional EDM). Instead, it sounded really damn intriguing. I wasn't quite sold on it yet, because my pre-concessions about EDM and my annoyance with that incessant need to have ridiculously long build-ups to four-beat deafening kick drums was still looming in the back of my head as the thing this was going to turn into no matter what.

And then it came out. And I listened to it. And I was… enjoying it. Not necessarily loving it on my first couple of listens. But this is an album that really grew on me. The more I listened to it, the more I realized how bloody unique this album actually is.

Then, I fell down the rabbit-hole of looking into Porter Robinson more closely, seeing interviews and this long livestream he did about this album, and I realized what was so fucking cool about it: It's his. It is unequivocally, undoubtedly an album that could have only been made by this one person. It's so raw in its sound and so specific to a certain style and passion that really drew me in. The fact that that passion was virtual worlds, a concept that I freaking love just made me love the album even more. So yeah, I love Worlds. It has faults, but that's what makes it perfect (as paradoxical as that is).

Editing Music

In elementary school, I was very interested in editing. Especially, as it turned out, editing to music. I, along with some of my friends, made these game music videos (or fanmade trailers or whatever), where I captured footage from a game or trailers and edited it to music. Yeah, that's been done before. I know. But we were kids and it's a while ago.

I was recently reminded of this via. a very surprising comment on one of my YouTube videos of a Fallout 3 thing from 2008 I did with "Mad World" (man, I wasn't original back then… I apologize for that.)

Holy shit, that comment, by the way. I made them buy the game?! That's kind of nuts.

Anyway, this rediscovery of my old hobby made me think of another, closely related thing I did, which was edit music tracks together into one, much longer song. I usually did this with video game music, soundtracks etc. where I already had several layers or several of the same version of the same song to work with, making it easier.

Then I listened to Worlds again. And remembered that most of these songs run in 90 BPM. And have a very similar sound… And the glitches in the songs are perfect for cutting already… I wonder…

So that's in fact what I did: I made a Worlds medley. Here it is, a 26 minute long compilation/medley of all the songs in Worlds:

All the sounds are taken directly from the album, and not manipulated, added to, or changed in any way, expect through volume changes (and rearrangement).

I don't know if it's any good, but I had a blast making it, so hopefully you'll at least enjoy some of it. It feels like a weird mix of my childhood and my current tastes, so in some sense this fits me really well right now.

I still got all the old song-edits I did. Most of them are pretty bad, but let me know if you want to hear some of them!
(You can still see all my old game videos on my YouTube channel--but most of those are also pretty bad).