IT'S A WHOLE DANG 'BUM O' ME

it's a thing people have been enjoying in surprising-amount-of-money and surely-hyperbolic-compliment sorts of ways.

I'll be putting tracks up on here one at a time.

(Copy-paste from elsewhere:)

I'm about 17 years into fiddling with music software, and have never before in this time released what I could feel comfortable calling an Actual Album. in recent years, I made a few attempts, with some solid overarching ideas and production work put in, but every time, I started feeling dissatisfied with the work, or otherwise uneager to continue, and my drive died out.

I've struggled a lot with finishing music in general. my MO has been to open SunVox for a couple hours, make a Doodle that tangibly conveys enough of an idea to my own satisfaction, and then not touch it again, because my headspace usually shifts too much from day to day, and merely-imaginarily tweaking old things into timelessly-extended soundscapes that better fit my current mood is usually Enough to keep me momentarily entertained. this has resulted in a quadruple-digit accumulation of ideas that probably deserve better.

so here I am with an album.

a thing about me that may or may not have come across in whatever location this message is being pasted into is that my comedic impulses are hard to contain, and I've wound up with a number of Running Gags. essentially, what I did was opportunistically apply the Bit-Doing mindset to making music for someone, as I found myself doing that.

I was going to lean into this album being made as a Hilarious Bit with heavy-handed irony, but I don't want to undersell the effort and earnestness that ended up being put into it. while most of these tracks are still single-session works, and I prioritized having things to share over polishing them to death, I am proud. I pushed myself farther than I've gone for music in years, working incessantly for a couple weeks straight, and I've reached new personal milestones.

frankly, it's because I finally truly viscerally care to see people I feel close to happy, and not disappoint them, and I can't type that with perfectly dry eyes.

there are a number of projects I hope I can now find it in myself to revisit. if this is somewhere I've shared some of my musical doodling, I'd like to know if anyone actually has old favorites that stand out to them.

(Copy-paste of album info from Bandcamp:)

this wasn't as well-planned as I hoped my Proper Debut Album would be, but it does demonstrate the most important things that I always hoped a Proper Debut Album would — that I've got some stylistic range, and I'm no stranger to fun and humor, but I primarily want to make things that are Beautiful, Personal, and decidedly Unique if possible, by whatever potentially-idiosyncratic way I've come to make things by just enjoying sounds and fiddling with my own.

creation of all tracks driven by the idea that a dearly-loved friend, who I'm happy to thematically honor here, might like them. 🩵 commitment to A Bit is one powerful thing. more context for each individual track is available under its info.

all tracks, and the vast majority of sounds, made with NightRadio’s brilliant hybrid tracker and virtual modular synthesizer SunVox, which I've been using on phones for more than a decade while I've been bedridden, and am now using on my Steam Deck. I will consider myself a successful artist if I can help fellow disabled creatives discover this godsend for serious, relatively-accessible music production that probably runs on whatever you need it to, usually for free! hopefully in the future I'll have a better archive up, but for the time being, if you want the project files for this album, I'd direct you to the SunVox Music server on Discord, where they should be easy to search for: bdaWmBAnTM (if I can be non-lazy enough to make an album, you can fix an invite link)

I've been thinking short-ish albums are the way to go... easier to finish more often, easier for ears to snack on. this got to be a decent length anyway, though.

the title is an appropriate play on Tomonari Nozaki's "Une Histoire de Bleu", which is a very nice ambient album that had a non-zero amount of direct influence upon some of this. you should listen to it, too.

thank you to those whose interests lie with the comfort and happiness of those who reside in the world we live in, those who love to see the self-actualization of the most vulnerable among us, those who understand the importance of one embracing who their spirit says they are, those who celebrate the uniqueness they find in others, those who generally actively try to have a positive net impact on their immediate surroundings...

abolish enslavement of prisoners, abolish the death penalty, free the innocent, support rehabilitation for the socially disposed-of even if you think those people are like totally yucky, recognize that affirmative treatment (e.g. HRT, social and legal acceptance...) for trans folk is so far over the threshold of medical and moral necessity that anyone casting doubt is making a fool of themself, try meeting some cool plural systems if you haven't, never stop dreaming of a world where no one is required to have already mastered a skill and found a way to monetize it in order to eat

I've been lying in bed with a broken body for going on 12 years, yet I feel incredibly privileged and lucky to have spent this time developing my musical abilities and finding connection with others online, able to rely on my aging parents for shelter and maintenance. this situation is a house of cards. please fix the world to ensure it keeps being safe for me, if you have the time.

(don't miss the bonus track!)

mastered by me, as in "I totally mastered the act of producing these songs in this exact way that I did"

If any throat magician is up for a little exercise, my silly little request is here to fulfill:

I'm trying to get this timbre figured out to hear a character’s voice in my head as originally described, but I think I need to hear people with different throats attempt it, cuz mine just ain't right for it. It's supposed to be breathy or raspy, with vocal fry (or moreso “croaking”). I'm mainly speaking with... I wanna say sub-nasal tension, but I think ideally it would be deeper-throated, and sound a little more rounded and open, with delivery that's still smooth, emotive, and conversational, if possible — slightly cockatoo-esque? Sorry if there's more helpful terminology I could be using, I'm not really a voice actor. There's a certain form of throat I think would be ideal, but I don't want to discourage anyone who'd give it a shot for me. Thanks if you do.

also doing a voice was fun so

and I also posted this on Bluesky in case someone there might go for it, if you wanna share/see if anyone drops anything off as a reply:

https://bsky.app/profile/saltbearer.bsky.social/post/3la77fcehy72k

there's a rant I've wanted to go on but It's Been A Very Busy Month so for the moment here's a quick post

I've felt vague impulses to Write Something about Doing Music because sometimes I like to Write Something and I Do Music and sometimes people are like "wow how do you do music like that" so I feel like I should do a mashup of Writing and Music but iunno what specifically to write about in relation to Doing Music so I think I need a prompt so is anyone actually curious about how I in particular approach some specific kind of music thing

better edit: reformatted as blog post on Dreamwidth

One of the many little resonant buzzes amidst the emanations of the vuvuzela chorus in the back of my mind is a nagging feeling that I have been in A State of Constant Mistake-Making by not being more engaged with the Newgrounds community.

I don't feel like I'm sufficiently surrounded by people who reinforce life patterns conducive to cool-art-doing. This is a place where cool art people are. I should probably connect with cool art people more. The theory that I will be more of a cool art doer if I am jostled by such patterned people seems sound enough.

This me thing was put on the front page a while back:

... and from what I understand, that has enabled me to put this me thing on the front page. So HELLO, READERS OF THIS ME THING FROM THE FRONT PAGE. I am Saltbearer, or So?ing Machine if I am acting as your sound dealer. I've been essentially bed-bound and isolated from meatspace humans for over 11 years, and make weird music on smartphones with SunVox, an inexpensive tracker/modular synth app, which happens to be free for desktops if you'd like to poke around in it real quick. I am generally a wacky li’l goofwad. I most likely have some form of undiagnosed and untreated mental health disorder, which results in diminished prolificity with regards to creation of any form of content in any medium. I want myself to want to finish more music, and give visual art a fairer shot, and write fiction formatted as chatlogs, but I can't seem to remain in any particular headspace long enough to see a long-term project through to completion, and it feels very easy to just put everything off indefinitely.

I just put off streaming unfinished pieces of music until I had almost a year’s worth of backlog, but I finally did it:

(Q1 2024 / Q2 2024)

While I don't have something to contribute as often as I’d like, I've always really appreciated the ethos and functionalities of Newgrounds, and continue to recommend it to musician peers for reasons including streaming quality, fair handling of collaborations, a culture of relative freedom, and the option of embedding music underneath full-res cover art via the Art Portal. I still don't know of an online platform that carries a greater air of being structurally suited to helping tomorrow's great multimedia artists grow.

Most of what’s kept me from being more engaged here has been a lack of impulses to seek new content — I already have an insurmountable backlog of albums I should listen to and shows I should watch and games I should play, and haven't felt like touching much of anything in it lately. It doesn't help that my phone's headphone jack has become faulty (and a USB-C adapter didn't work as well as I'd hoped), and I'm too nearsighted to use my computer easily (I have a new glasses prescription, but have yet to acquire them), so for the time being, it takes some non-negligible extra effort to properly consume content creators’ created content.

I'm also admittedly starting to wish the ~quaint/familiar/nostalgic~ vestige that is the star rating system weren't still here. Over time, it's become increasingly apparent that granular, quantitative scoring systems don't actually convey accurate, useful information to artists or audiences, no matter how overthought the underlying rubrics might be. Receptions of works by niche boundary- and convention-skirting auteurs are prone to being skewed by the wrong audiences finding them and not intuiting how they're meant to be taken, and complicated rubrics themselves may impose approaches to audienceship that detract from one's experiences of works by amplifying focuses upon angles that the works were never intended to be approached from. Those issues can bleed into written reviews, but at least words carry more specific meanings to weigh.

Regardless of how they're used in practice, I do still like that reviews are “reviews” here, framed as opportunities to provide useful feedback, rather than mere “comments” to be dropped off. The default suggestion is to speak more deeply of the art than to give a passing remark.

It often feels forced/unwarranted if I try to offer “useful” advice, though. I'm perhaps too afraid of stepping on toes these days, and of stamping out idiosyncrasies that separate works from trends I'm accustomed to that inform how things “should” be. There are infinitely many ways to Do Art, and I don't want to risk contributing to stifling what might develop into stylistic signatures that would stand out as unique.

But then, I'm always personally curious about whatever anyone might have to say about my works, even if pieces of feedback that are perfectly aligned with my goals and values have been few and far between for all the years I've received any. If it's safe to assume that's a typical lean for artists’ sentiments, then I should probably be more concerned about leaving artists without engagement than giving the wrong feedback... and about not having a tangible presence in the community where I could.

My issues here are ones I assume would be best to simply get over.

I should make a point of engaging with Some Things on Newgrounds on a regular basis (forums included), to remind myself that I can just do that, and that going to the effort often proves rewarding, as there's plenty here to like, and my brain will let me like things, even if I have to drag myself to them.

Numerical valuations of art assigned from my gut feel awkward, but as long as that ball is in this court, I should kick it around and keep in mind that it's just a game. “Waiting for votes” probably feels like a heavier weight than a tainted rating. Perhaps I should just hide my votes.

In time, if I get in the habit of saying things about things thing-doers have done, I'll surely find a voice I feel more comfortable using.

s’yeh I exist and generally like this place ‘n’ its stuff ‘n’ I'd like to feel more like a part of it and encouraged to be so, so here I am acknowledging that in one of the better places to do so.

I'd be like “I'd be like “here's some other me things I've submitted for you to form first impressions around” but everything is pretty unique and has something worth highlighting so it's too hard to pick” but that would be missing a good opportunity so I'll just drop a few more here: 

Shout-outs to an alphabetized subset of a subset of the people whose presences contribute to Newgrounds being a place worth paying attention to, enjoy familiarizing: @asserter @cheez2600 @cthrn @debisco @dynamitegrizzly @fruitsbat @heyjellybear @keith2002 @kindclutter @kingbastard @logickin @neurononeuro @phantasmosthedata @razex @thatandyguy @vekon — @grynmoor doesn't actually have anything up here, but I'd suggest preemptively following in the event they ever do.

There is a Discord server invite in an older news post which is active as of the time of this post, which is not formatted as a link, in order to minimize malicious bot intruders. Closer-to-real-time communication is fun.

EDIT: EVENT HAS CONCLUDERED. The lump of Barbie and Ken dolls I mashed together: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/552014014713036801/772681717101363210/hallomix_prob_final_online-audio-converter.com.mp3

↓ comments I dumped alongside it

<https://pastebin.com/40r8DVcX>

↓ credits and links

<https://pastebin.com/HVHZPLy9>

November 1st • 5 Pacific • 8 Eastern

The unofficial PC Music Discord (permanent invite code CBnScgN with that discord dot gg goodness in front) presents: POP SPELL, where server regulars (including me) dump 13:00-max arrangements of songs in your ears + maybe a couple visuals into your eyes through Twitch while everyone goes nuts on Discord, and it's gonna be realllllllllll great and fun if you're into what we're into, and I'm into stuff that's heavier on the experimental side of the intersection between experimental and pop and really kinda forgot about the Pop part of Pop Spell entirely as I was making it but some technical pop ended up in it anyway so I'm totally in the clear there

so yeah YOU LIKE MUSIC THIS IS THAT

https://soundcloud.com/so-ing-machine/transient-the-humans-are

transient - "The humans are shallow" -So?ing Machine's shallower machine mix-

I've wanted to do this for a long time, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Check it out! ... through there, I'm kinda afraid to post it here because of NG's stricter policy against sampling things willy-nilly.

Also I'm gonna keep this in every recent news post probably (and it's relevant, because I uploaded the project file here and the program is free): Like Discord? Wanna chat? Get updated when I or certain other cool people put out new stuff? Including separate alerts for WIPs and project files and stuff? Yes you do. I've made this decision for you. There is no stopping this. Take YTJ4khx and stick discord.gg/ in front.

Like Discord? Wanna chat? Get updated when I or certain other cool people put out new stuff? Including separate alerts for WIPs and project files and stuff? Yes you do. I've made this decision for you. There is no stopping this. Take YTJ4khx and stick discord.gg/ in front.

I made my first account more than a decade ago when I had just turned 12. My old site activity was too embarrassing for me to want to keep using it for long after. I'm happy it's been maintained though.

I love Newgrounds. So many artists who grew up here are still a part of our lives today, doing amazing work. Between the different Portals and iconic character usage, the interconnected functionalities and communities of the platform do a great job of supporting a veneer of free collaboration. Like... this place is where amateur artists were meant to be, to flourish. It's got such a rich history, such great alumni. It doesn't have to be history just yet, right?

Making a fresh account here has been on my mind for a long time, and now that there's a glimmer of hope for a resurgence in cultural relevance, it seems like a good time to actually do it. There's so much I've missed that's available to dig through, and I feel like I might actually be able to make decent contributions to the audio portal. I'd love to offer financial support if I actually have any income at some point, but in the meantime, I hope people hold the community in high regard and allow it to grow.