We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the dreams…

I’d like to start out with a pretentious Arthur O’Shaughnessy quote. It seems like it’s about musicians, but the rest is a bunch of boring stuff about England. Willy Wonka was right to omit it.

Life has been busy, some things exciting and some boring, same as it ever was. But is there anything quite as boring as listening to someone list what’s kept them from updating? GET TO THE CONTENT I hear the Algorithm cry!

Wrapping up last year, I composed the score to accompany the Phoenix Zoo Holiday Lights! The music was five minutes long, and a talented team of lighting designers actually programmed the lights to sync with the soundtrack. A giant LED matrix on the central tree even displayed elephants, lions, and giraffes as their calls could be heard in the music. The client has asked for two sections of intense animal soundscapes, so I used a lot of rhythmic animal sounds to create a kind of animal kingdom drum line. (My favorite were the hippo grunts!)

By now, fans of Wizard101 will know of the great Vinyl release of 2023. We only anticipated making 500 copies, but the backlog of demand was too great and the walls fell. Apologies for not anticipating the demand, and forcing some who were a mere ten minutes late to the presale to suffer the eternal indignity of having a small ‘2’ printed on your copy, but we just had no idea how to gauge interest. Three times I saw someone posting on Xwitter that they had received their copy in the mail, so three times I messaged them and asked how it sounded, and three times received the answer, “Dunno. I don’t own a turntable.”

Which is cool. I used to love physical releases, too.

We’re not quite done with announcements about the W101 soundtrack, though… I feel like the boy who cried wolf at this point, but seriously: the wolf is like right outside the village and is about to pounce. The wheels are actually in motion. The… wolf wheels. Look: metaphors and not mixing them are not my strong suit.

I hit a thousand YouTube subscribers! Sounds like a tremendously low bar compared to the big guys (“big guys” in this case are most cosmetic influencers) but I’m honored to have found that many people who dig what I do, and have gotten to meet some cool people as a result. A legitimate thanks to all who made it possible. Any ideas for 1000 sub video, leave it in the comments. (WHICH I HAVE TURNED BACK ON AFTER FINALLY FINDING THE TIME TO RESEARCH HOW TO STOP COMMENT SPAM!!)

Just in case you missed it, I posted a ONE HOUR LONG video on my YouTube channel about resurrecting the ancient W101 tracks and the remixing process. I was right about it not being for everyone, but if a deep dive into sounds and MIDI sounds like your jam (!) maybe we could ratchet the view count up a few notches.

I did an online talk for the University of Michigan, that has a video game music appreciation course (you kids get all the fun academics these days) and it was a lot of fun. The questions from the class were my favorite part: there were several W101 players and they asked some very deep-cut questions about the score. The usual “How did you start composing” and “what is your favorite instrument?” questions were replaced with “I noticed the second motif in the third movement of the Avalon score was a retrograde callback to another theme in Marleybone… were you making a point about the cultural appropriations carried out by the Saxons around 1000AD?”

So anyway… hopefully more to come shortly, just didn’t want to overload ya.