there goes the neighbourhood
musicdisk by smash



track list


1. michelle

this jazz ballad was originally written in december 1997 for the turpzz
jazz tracking compo in feb 98, where it came 2nd.
the sax in the song was recorded especially for it live from my friend's
sax, then cut up and resequenced by me. the guitar was
sampled from a sample cd. by the way, it was an enormous pain to get it
to sound like this. riffs are often quite tricky to use..
of all the songs on the disk this is the oldest and also probably the
one which has been most distributed already, but it was still never
released properly by me, so i stuck it on here. it's one of my favourite
songs that i've done, it has a certain feeling to it. 

the pic appearing with it was done by filter.



2. here come da law

lemm described this as "it sounds like you ripped off the theme to some
70s cop show".. well, i didn't, but i can see how it could sound like that.
it's cheesy-ass brass and latino percussion, and it moves along pretty
quickly. it was going to be released around march 1998, but somehow never
was.. so here it is.
the samba drum loop comes from a santana cd. check out the analogue synth
sounds in the background, it's the first proper song i ever used one of my
own synths on. quite a bouncy bassline and some of my better trumpet solos
back up the brass section leads.

the art used in the interface with it was by xhale/dcs.




3. barbarella psychedelia

this song is my little homage to the cheesy scifi films of
the 60s and 70s, and of course in particular the film barbarella.
i originally wrote this at the end of dec 97 the hope of entering it in
the party 7 music compo.. of course that never happened due to the
guy entering it for me getting there too late or something. but it didn't 
really matter as the song was very rushed and sucked a bit, so it sat on my 
hd unreleased. a few months later i found it and got the idea to remix it a 
bit to make it funkier, and ended up almost completely rewriting it (i think 
the drum beat survived, that's about it). 
i got the idea from seeing all the strange disco scenes in films like
buck rogers, where they have these people playing all this weird
synth-disco music. it had to be done.
i had great great fun doing this track. there are a lot of sounds from
my analogue synth in there, and of course there are the vocals -
they were "sung" by me, but some people have asked me if i used a vocoder
on them.. the answer is no, i didn't, but i did of course apply a lot of
effects to them. i think it was some combination of pitch shift, eq,
chorus, reverb and flange in soundforge.. and they were cut up and retuned
too (as my singing sucked).

the picture for it was done by orome.



4. when i died for the 7th time

i started this back in autumn 1997, originally to make an mp3 out of it
and have vocals and everything. well, it didn't quite work out like that
and ended up sitting unfinished for ages. then i went and used most
of the samples for barbarella psychedelia, and it looked like it was
never going to be done.. i later rediscovered it around may 1998, and
started trying to sort it out and cut some of the shit out. plus it had
to be cut down from 8mb to something more reasonable.. i was
actually going to enter this in MC6, but i got talked out of it and
entered soemthing else instead, fortunately.
you may notice that this one doesn't have a really clear melody and
srtucture. it's a bit more improvisational and freeform. 
this is most likely not going to be popular.. it doesn't appear to have 
much melody or a verse/chorus structure. i went the other way with this.
it has quite a bit more detail than a lot of my songs, which may not
be immediately noticable - but i put a bit more thought into the rhythm
patterns and backing than usual. 
the song is in two parts, and the second part is the main one. this is
sitting on a bass line and builds up from there into something quite big.
thanks to beek in particular for the two lead samples from his 
juno 60.. he gave me them ages ago, and that's what i started a
lot of the song from.
i imagine this will just float over a lot of people and won't really grab,
but listen to it a few times and maybe you will see it has some hidden
depths. There is a lot more detail, a lot more going on than the typical 
songs on this disk, with several different leads together in places
and a detailed rhythm track.

the art for it was drawn by flood/noice.



5. jive

groove.. definately groove over harmony. quite intricate rhythm
parts make up for the shortage of melody. this is dirty funk.
this song has actually been released (for tesko, around june 1998). 
i originally wrote it for takeover 98's musiccompo where it bombed
quite badly (didn't make round 2). but thanks to findus for entering
it for me anyway. after hearing this i was a little
pissed off, especially considering some of the songs that made it
(no offence to the composers but.. i wonder about the organisers 
of the compo, you know?). so i uploaded it to the hornet archive,
but didn't publicise it much. so i don't expect many people
got it. 
turn up the volume.

the art for it was done by argus/theralite.




6. there goes the neighbourhood

this is the longest track on the disk by some way. i started it in june 98,
but i got stuck on it for ages until i came back to it and finished it
in jan 99. it was originally going to have vocals, and i made some for it,
but i later decided they were shit so i took them all out.
it's quite a nasty song in places, quite a dark atmosphere. you may hear
that it seems to end in quite a lot of places in the song and then
start up again a second later. a big loud funk song. 
this song will not play properly in impulse tracker at all -
this is because IT only loads 99 samples and 99 instruments, so if you
load it in IT you will lose quite a few of the instruments in the song.
some credit must fly to willbe, who's lead guitar samples i used in the
guitar solo (ripped from his excellent track to the sparks demo).
i suspect that while hearing this you are either thinking that it is quite
good, or that it is a huge mess which lacks any structure and coherence
and makes no real sense. that would be about right. definately not a radio
song, you know? but it does have at least a little groove.

the pic was done by markus/dcs.



7. floating on garbage

this is quite odd. the chorus is quite unjazzish, but some of the other
parts are very much acid jazz. do you like the didgeridoo?
i wanted to do a song with a more "world" sound, but i definately didn't
want to make one of those "this is an 'ethnic' song! look
at all the flutes and jungle effects and drums and shit like that!"
type pieces.. they suck. a lot of trackers (especially those who usually
make the very standard tracked music styles) occasionally do some kind
of rock or jazz or orchestral or "ethnic" piece, and they just do all
the stereotypical things to create some generic sound of that genre without
any identity, and think they are being 'different' and 'original'. 
they replace the juno with a piano and call it jazz...
i hope this doesn't sound like that.
i'd like to give thanks to astradyne and stote for some of the percussion
samples. you sent me those sounds about two years ago - looks like i finally
found a decent use for them =)
the song features probably the best trumpet solo i've done to date. in my 
opinion it's the best song on the disk. the drums are quite intricate, and
it's all built on the bass line. 

the art that appears with it was drawn by inferno.



8. the girl with stars in her hands (stargirl)

something a bit lighter to end with.
this is a bit closer to the old style of amiga tracked "synthjazz" 
than realistic jazz music. i decided to go with all synths for the 
leads rather than stick in lots of live instruments. 
the leads were mainly sampled from my analogue synth, and the
rhodes electric piano from my yamaha p50m piano module (the only
track where i used that synth). in the chorus, the chords used
were rhodes chords like in the rest of the song, but diskwritten
and effected in soundforge for added wahwah.
i think it has quite a warm feel to it. i tried to give the chorus
a bit of a catchy lead, but the leads in the rest of it are 
slightly trickier.. watch out for the extended rhodes solo after
the first chorus especially. 
this is the last track i started for the disk - it was started in
january 99. once again its all built on the bass line.
play it at the end of the disk. 

the picture used with it was drawn by tmk/inf.









