Music By Curtsy Rehearsed
A continuously updating thread on my music releases, most of which are available on the Bandcamp page.
Background
Press Coverage
As I have made little to no effort at self-promotion I was surprised to find that an old Curtsy Rehearsed project had received some press attention in the Summer of 2022, albeit in a local Irish paper that few people know about.
Found at the business end of a recent Bandcamp dig, there’s relatively little that your writer knows about coder and music-maker Shane Crowley, outside of a keenly-honed grasp on technology’s ever-shifting contours as displayed in blogs linked out from his Curtsy Rehearsed project’s Bandcamp page. On the evidence of this lightly glitchy yet slightly woozy serving of electronic exploration, it’s a state of affairs your writer would like to rectify.
source: Evening Echo
I like the mini-review, which correctly identifies the music's wooziness. Since then I have made — in my opinion — far better music that has received no attention. You can listen to Transitive Nostalgia below:
My Original Motivation
During the era of Covid-19 lockdowns I had to teach remotely. I wanted to create good lecture videos, which — for me — had to include music. In my naivety, I immediately (and fairly) got a strike on YouTube for using copyrighted music. I then looked for some copyright-free music but hated all of it. In the absence of alternatives, I decided to make my own music.
The songs I made are an interesting artifact of the time. Most of them are included in the three-part Theory of Parts series, named after a metaphysics paper I was then struggling to write and publish.
The anxieties of the early-phase of the pandemic bled into the songs, even if they were only intended as interludes to lectures on food chemistry! One of my favourites from that period — "You Won't For Long, Then You Will Again" — was a reflection on the constraints young people were living under and the anticipation of being free of them. The album art was my "garden" at the time, a network of pipes and vents inhabiting a forgotten space behind old city apartments and businesses.
Experiment and Bricolage
I am not a real musician. I just do music.
Not being a musician I rely on whatever capacity I have as a listener and an openness to use whatever is to hand. I find sounds I like and combine them. When I make something that sounds bad I modify, replace and arrange until it sound better.
I don't know what I'm doing.
I conceive of the process as "experimental" in a loosely scientific sense: there are a set of questions regarding a mixture of components (sounds), followed by an arduous sequences of (listening) tests of those hypotheses, which may involve the substitution or modification of the components, before a promising idea begins to emerge and is refined for eventual presentation.
Sometimes I judge that a song has not succeeded. Yet these failures often get re-incorporated into something new. A recent successful song-making procedure looked like this:
- Two failed songs were re-sampled and combined
- A phone recording of me singing incoherently was digitally processed
- Samples from a pre-WW1 woodwind recording were found and incorporated
- Everything was tweaked, arranged and mixed over several days
- Eventually the results felt good
Other songs were built mostly with code, like Algotaylorist using Sonic Pi and the title track of Dereferenced using Tidal Cycles
Some were composed in a more traditional way, with me poking at a MIDI keyboard in an amateurish manner until I captured something that sounded right.
I have no universal recipe, partially due to my own impatience and inconsistency.
Music for What Exactly?
I wouldn't recommend the music for a dinner party. I don't think it can be danced to. I am unsure if it will lull anyone to sleep. The songs, I feel, are useful as prompts for thinking about whatever: creativity, memories, technology, modern life...
Having a library of songs helped me design lectures. If I wanted students to feel the gravity of a weighty topic I would use a more sinister song, like Being Qua Being. To create a sense of optimism about the potential of science and technology I might use the synthetic but hopeful Progress is Monotonic. In lighter moments, or when I needed to switch gears, I would play the retro-gaming-sounding Fantasy Machines.
My favourite part about making these songs is that when I listen back to them they are a mystery to me:
What was I thinking when I made that? Why does it sound the way it does? How did I decide to give it that title?
They become tools for introspection.
Goodbye Curtsy?
This project had some degree of baggage, forged as it was in a crisis. I still associate the making of music with the job of doing lectures. As it was originally intended as "background music" I didn't want to foreground myself too much, which is one of the reasons vocals are either absent or obscured.
One of the first Curtsy Rehearsed songs does include me singing, albeit filtered through a fairly heavy vocoder:
When my voice is present in other songs I might not even be able to identify it as such. It could sound like something else entirely now. Twisted, fragmented and mangled beyond recognition.
Empathy for Musicians
One benefit of trying hard to make and release music is the sense of empathy it created in me for those who do this with even greater seriousness.
Mastering is a painstaking and complex process, which I know very little about. Doing it well ensures that the collection of sounds have an optimal quality across a range of devices, platforms and listening situations.
It reminds me of the least fun part of another sometimes hobby — coding — where you try to ensure what you make is available/accessible to the broadest group of people. Say you've made an interesting game or animation but now:
Does it run on Windows, Mac and Linux? If it runs in a browser does it run on this specific browser that 2% of internet users still use? How does it look on the smallest phone screen on the market?
Similarly, you might make a song that sounds great on headphones but what about earbuds? What about one earbud? What about cheap bluetooth speakers? What about YouTube after it compresses the file? Early on I realised that certain recording artifacts like high-frequency pops and cracks were only evident when I listened on earbuds. So I would try to first mix with headphones and then with earbuds. Then I noticed that the mix would sound muddy through speakers!
Even if you compose, mix and master everything to your satisfaction, there is no guarantee that the manner in which it is heard will be as you intended. A coherent album, with a tone that evolves and tracks that provide context for each other, may be summarily dismissed after a 12-15 second preview of two tracks, listened to out-of-order through a single bluetooth earbud.
You should be encouraged to learn new skills even when they might initially seem beyond your abilities. You will get better in the trying and might even make something worthwhile. At a minimum, you will develop a greater appreciation for the difficulties that its practitioners must overcome.
Summer 2024
This Summer I released two new Curtsy Rehearsed projects.
Kinds of Summer
Kinds of Summer is the first thing I've made that feels "summery". I particularly like the dancey urgency of the title song — and the stoned, washed out quality of the next one — Nicely Tired with a Warm Buzz. These are genuine head-nodders, but I'm (sadly) biased...
Get Kinds of Summer on BandCamp
Paradise Syndrome
Paradise Syndrome is almost completely sampled from old bossa nova tracks, although you might not be able to tell with the cold, spacey hip-hop of So Blown Through or the roboticised pep of Encouragement Song. It's far more obvious with My Idle Animation and the title track.
Get Paradise Syndrome on BandCamp
I really like the Summer 2024 releases, let me know if you do too.
Some notable features:
- All the Curtsy Rehearsed music is now free: there's an option to pay that I'm only leaving open because it helps with search-indexing, so I recently learned.
- I stopped caring so much about LUFS: these songs are mixed louder than my conventional target of 14 LUFS and it's to their benefit. The 14 came from when I researched LUFS normalisation on streaming services but I don't put my music there anymore so there's no point.
- Upping the tempo: the first song in Kinds of Summer has a BPM of >120, which is at least double what I would commonly use before and firmly in the vicinity of dance music. If BandCamp had per-song genre tagging I might have used the "dance" tag at least once.
Now I want to do something creative that isn't music for a while.
I'm not sure what it will be.
April 2024
Rurality
I made this in a day after a short trip to the countryside. It was mostly inspired by "found scenes", like peculiar country sheds bursting with wood and decorated with buoys. I like the idea of making tiny albums as an immediate response to an experience and it's something I intend to explore.
Rosacea
This is a little moodier and more dramatic than many of the other releases. I've always wanted to name an album like one of my teenage favourites: Alopecia by Why? I find the style of sampling on some of these songs quite unique — lots of changeable orchestral flourishes. The photo is of a crashed car that has always been in my parents' back garden.
Indirection
This is a collection of music I made under an alias when I stopped doing Curtsy Rehearsed. A lot of these songs were inspired by memories of growing up. There's a tribute to Lu Wilson in there too. The photo is of me hugging a cropped-out Aesop Rock at a concert when I was around 17.
March 2024
Punctums
Punctums was a direct response to February's Newly Sincere. After a largely drumless project I wanted to use drums again! Programming drums is something I tend to find quite boring so I varied the tempo and time signatures a lot to make it more interesting for me and the listener. Each song was made by first laying down the drums and I think this made them feel more integrated.
February 2024
Newly Sincere
I was really happy with how Newly Sincere turned out — I'm especially partial to track 5 (below). Here I finally abandoned any pretence of making hip-hop and it was freeing. Drums are almost completely absent in this one and that forced me to experiment more with mood, percussion and texture.