The American Album Free Download Digital Release
Arrangement
Composed by: Alexander Brandon, Tommy Tallarico, Peter McConnell, Robert Prince, George Sanger, Jack Wall, Joe McDermott, Robyn Miller, Jeremy Soule
Arranged by: Mazedude
Published by: Mazedude
Catalog #:
Release Date: 2005-11-14
Status: Free download - mazedude.com
Music from: Jazz Jackrabbit 2, Earthworm Jim 2, Grim Fandango, Commander Keen 5: The Armageddon Machine, The 7th Guest, Earthworm Jim, Myst III: Exile, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, Myst, DOOM II, Riven, Global Gladiators, Secret of Evermore

Tracklist

01 - Jackrabbit Transformer [6:20]
02 - Glow Worm Jim [6:57]
03 - Bone Wagon, for Bones [1:33]
04 - Slick Rippin Keen [4:25]
05 - Microscopism [4:48]
06 - Keyz to New Junk City [4:17]
07 - Wheels of Wonder [3:30]
08 - Zombies Ate My Tracker [4:04]
09 - Myst Shrooms [3:48]
10 - Countdown to Death [5:22]
11 - Zapper's Freedom [5:02]
12 - Exiled Samples [4:25]
13 - Rockin' the Andes [2:10]
14 - K-Pax for Evermore [5:11]
15 - Opening to Hell [7:55]

Total Time: 1:09:52

Credits

1: Jackrabbit Transformer
Original: "Water Level" from Jazz Jackrabbit 2
Composer: Alexander Brandon

2: Glow Worm Jim
Original: "Subterranean" from Earthworm Jim 2
Composer: Tommy Tallarico

3: Bone Wagon, for Bones
Original: "Bone Wagon" from Grim Fandango
Composer: Peter McConnell

4: Slick Rippin Keen
Original: "Make it Tighter" from Commander Keen 5
Composer: Robert Prince

5: Microscopism
Original: "Microscope," "Cake Music," "Dolls of Doom," and "Coffin Dance" from The 7th Guest
Composer: The Fat Man (George Sanger)

6: Keyz to New Junk City
Original: "New Junk City" from Earthworm Jim
Composer: Tommy Tallarico

7: Wheels of Wonder
Original: "Wheels of Wonder" from Myst III: Exile
Composer: Jack Wall

8: Zombies Ate My Tracker
Original: "Pyramid of Fear" from Zombies Ate My Neighbors
Composer: Joe McDermott, The Fat Man (George Sanger)

9: Myst Shrooms
Original: "Myst Theme," "Sirrus Theme," and "Unfinale" from Myst
Composer: Robyn Miller

10: Countdown to Death
Original: "Countdown to Death" from Doom 2
Composer: Robert Prince

11: Zapper's Freedom
Original: "Catherine's Freedom" and "Moeity" from Myst II: Riven
Composer: Robyn Miller

12: Exiled Samples
Original: "Exile" from Myst III: Exile
Composer: Jack Wall

13: Rockin' the Andes
Original: "MC Rock" from Global Gladiators
Composer: Tommy Tallarico

14: K-Pax for Evermore
Original: "Introduction" from Secret of Evermore
Composer: Jeremy Soule

15: Opening to Hell
Original: "Opening to Hell / Map 30" from Doom 2
Composer: Robert Prince

Liner Notes

1. "Jackrabbit Transformer"

When discussing the concept of this album with various friends and colleagues, I had a number of people request that atleast one of my tracks be decidedly patriotic sounding. Not only would it coincide with the title of the album, but it would also show respect and appreciation to our American soldiers overseas and around the world. This track honors that request, and I believe makes a suitable opening to the album.

Simultaneously, not only am I tributing an original game composition by Alexander Brandon, but I am also tributing his tracking style, via fusion with the orchestral. Elements of his pieces "Universe Electric," "Carpe Diem," and more are weaved throughout the mix.

I know it may be a bit on the long side - I almost ended it after the orchestral bit at 5 minutes... but couldn't resist climaxing it just one more time in full synthy splendor, complete with a key change.

Sometimes when making a mix, I'll put on a movie in the background, just to help pass the time. For this mix, I was trying to find a movie that had a very patriotic American feel to it. Guess which movie I picked? That's right. Rocky IV.

2. "Glow Worm Jim"

Another style tribute here, this time to one of the chillest musicians out there, "Xerxes." Now, you may know him as a member of Hellven, but I know him as a tracker. We even did a few compos together back in the day. But tracking or otherwise, the guy has clearly defined his own style of composition, and I dig it. And considering it's a style I enjoy writing too, it made perfect sense to include it on the album, and melded quite nicely with Tommy Tallarico's "Subterranean" theme from Earthworm Jim 2. There's also a bit of Mellow-D and Virgill influence here.

3. "Bone Wagon, for Bones"
          
Simply put, the music from "Grim Fandango" is awesome. So awesome that it is very hard to compete with. Yet I still wanted to remix something from it. So, I took my favorite tune from the game, and - considering the story of the game is played out by skeletons - I made it sound like bones. A bass marimba, two regular marimbas, and a xylophone, to be specific. It's short, but it's cute.

4. "Slick Rippin Keen"

Commander Keen! Man, I loved those games. Especially 4 and 5. "Goodbye Galaxy" to me stands out the most, due to its outer space setting, its quirky robot villains, and yes, the music.

Stylistically, this mix is a tribute to a great tracker who I admired while growing up. He calls himself Mick Rippon. You can see that the title of this track is a bit of a play on his name. Elements of his tracks "Maximalism," "Stealth Fairy," and many others are weaved through this tune. Using mostly Mick's own samples, I did my best to emulate his tracking style and appropriately enhance what was probably the coolest track from Commander Keen 5 at the same time. I think I pulled it off pretty well; I really enjoy listening to this one.

5. "Microscopism"

This one took a lot of tries to get right. Probably because it was the last remix I made for the album. After several stylistic attempts that just didn't work, it occurred to me that this would be the perfect piece with which to goof around with wacky time signatures. The original was written in basic 4/4, but the melodies were played sporadically, with lots of quarter note triplets and other strange things that just didn't quite line up with everything else right, so I just took that idea and ran with it.

Originally I wasn't going to go industrial with this... but it just sounded so good! I kept with the original 7th Guest flavor though (piano, congas, muted trumpet, etc).

You may remember the microscope puzzle as being a direct clone of the NES "Cool Spot" game - a mutant version of Othello. And one of the most frustrating puzzles in the game, I might add. Oh yeah, and I also mingled "Cake Music," "Dolls of Doom," "Coffin Dance," and more songs from the game into the mix. :)

Kudos to anyone who can figure out the time signature.

6. "Keyz to New Junk City"

Now, everyone knows I'm a tracker at heart. I don't buy the fancy keyboards, and I don't go all out with having a ridiculous library of expensive gigasamples. However, once in a long while, I'll buy a sample CD, just for kicks. One day, while cruising around Ilio, I came across a sampleset entitled "Keys to the City." The audio samples were pretty damn cool, the quality stood out from the other samples I had, and I'd been itching to get some new sounds, so I bought the thing. Sadly, I was very disappointed when I finally got it. The clips in WAV format sounded exactly like the audio samples, like, already completely sequenced. There was very little I could actually use, apart from chopping up and re-looping all the sounds myself.

But, it'd be a waste of money not to use them, so I went ahead and chopped up the ones I liked. Then I used them in this remix, giving it a new age kinda electronic jazz fusion sound. I also mingled in some scat vocals from my friend Amanda, a little bit of my own voice, a touch of Virgill percussion, and here it is.

Audiomidi.com has much better prices than Ilio, by the way.

7. "Wheels of Wonder"

This one's also a bit of a style homage to trackers I admire. Specifially Chris Hampton (Beek) and Ryan Ross (Firestar.) Beek's tune "Mercury Dance" is a phenomenal piece of chill tunage, and creates its own style. Firestar's "Fields of War" is the same, albeit a bit heavier. For this remix of "Wheels of Wonder" by Jack Wall, I have combined elements of those two pieces, in fusion with a touch of Jeroen Tel influence, and a whole bunch of my own ideas, and made what you hear here. It's a bit of a leap from the original tune - which was mostly ambient - but hey, that's why they call it a remix.

8. "Zombies Ate My Tracker"

As you may have noticed, in addition to composer tributes via the remixes, I also have several stylistic tributes on the album via the styles I've written them in, towards various trackers and film scorers and so on. This remix is also a style tribute.

To 15 year old Mazedude.

Yep. Me. Back in my teen years, when I first discovered tracking, the only other tracks that I had for reference were crappy low quality MODs and S3Ms. Whatever was available from the local BBSs, basically. That's right, we're talking before the Internet, before e-mail was popular, and before this whole digital music revolution. Files were small back then because they weren't easy to transfer, and as a result the samples were also pretty low quality. Yet at the time they were all I had. I had kinda a batch of favorites that I used to write my first several compositions... which all sucked, by the way. But hey, it's how I learned.

So, years later, putting together this album, I wondered "hmm, I wonder if I go back to those old crappy samples that I loved as a kid, and now that I actually know what I'm doing, could I make a good remix with the same sounds?" And to compliment the craziness of the notion, I picked the whimsical and spooky soundtrack to the classic "Zombies Ate My Neighbors" soundtrack, by Joe McDermott and The Fat Man.

Honestly, I'm not too sure how I succeeded in my effort. The whole concept is really an inside joke to those select few who have followed my music since I was a beginner, and that's not too many people. I enjoy it though. It's fun to reminisce with your own music sometimes. Ah, how far I've come.

9. "Myst Shrooms"

Ya know, it actually took me a very long time to figure out how I was going to remix the Myst music. Originally I was going to make a few separate mixes from the different themes, in varying styles. The main title music was going to be some cool orchestral synth fusion, the Sirrus theme was going to be Reich-esque "Music for 18 Instruments" minimalist work, and so on. But none of the ideas sounded right. First of all, the themes are short, and secondly, they are quite ambient, weaving melodic bits and phrases throughout a lush soundscape.

Then one day it clicked. What style could I write, that is absolutely perfect for weaving around oodles of melodic phrases, doesn't need to have incredible rhythmic accuracy, and could encapsulate several game themes if necessary? Acid jazz, of course!

So away I went, and after a couple of sleepless nights amidst the insanity of insomnia, I made this puppy.

10. "Countdown to Death"

I made this entire mix with string samples only. Well, and some heavily manipulated string samples.

That's right, every sound in this mix was created from strings. After all, ya take a pizz and pitch shift down fast enough and ya get a bass drum, ya over-reverb something, loop it and add a flange and ya get a lead synth, and so on. The end result is a very unique, yet uniform sounding mix, that certainly provided its share of mixing challenges. The end result is pretty cool though. A new take on an old theme. I wanted to make this one different from my other Doom 2 mixes.

11. "Zapper's Freedom"

Ah, Riven. A video game soundtrack based on about 3 chords. While a mostly ambient soundtrack, it did have a few tracks that really stood out. "Catherine's Freedom" is one of those tracks. Originally I was going to take the original idea and run with it, going all out with the harpsichord, pizzicati, and so on... but then when it came time to track it, I plugged in a bunch of samples from Zapper's "Late Shift," and the remix took on a life of it's own. This was another couple nights of craziness, pulling in ideas not only from Zapper, who I admire, but the great Quasian as well. Then I was having so much fun making it, I mingled in a few other themes from the game into the mix as well, including "Moeity."

Around this time, the Fall of 2005, they were doing construction on the roof of my condo in Tarzana, California. And they started early. Like, I'd be up until 3am making music, and then at 7am I'd wake up to the sounds of hammers, staples, drills, saws, and people banging around on my roof. Not fun. So one day I decided to whip out the microphone and record all the noise, directly from my window. I proceeded to then make a batch of honest industrial construction samples. If you listen carefully, you'll hear them in this piece. After all, when life gives ya lemons... well, you know the saying.

12. "Exiled Samples"

So, basically, the soundtrack to "Myst 3 : Exile" is amazing. Orchestra, choir, world instruments, solo vocalists... just amazing. And I had to make a remix of the theme for this album. The big question is... how? How can I, with my tools, compete with that? Well, by going backwards, of course! I'll take this really high quality, yet musically simple theme, and reverse it into a rather low quality, yet ridiculously intricate and complex remix. Yeah, that's it.

In so doing, I used the opportunity to revive an old tracker trick: importing non-music files into the program and trying to make music with them. It's true - by importing TXT files, EXE files, FNT files, and whatever, the main result is usually a painful blast of garbage noise. However, once in a while you can find a pitch amongst the noise. Then, if you are very crafty, and pay extreme attention to detail, you can actually make music with this noise.

I used this trick in an old remix of mine entitled "Cyborg Blobby," and I've had a surprisingly large amount of people request that I do more in that style. Making it work with something as massive and epic sounding as the theme to "Exile" was very, very challenging. Furthermore, the original theme is a full 5 minutes long, spanning various tempos, orchestrations, and really is a story amongst itself. I had to parallel that story with my remix, and dang was it hard. It came out good though.

13. "Rockin' the Andes"

So this is one of those deals where I started my remix in a certain style, had mixed feelings about it, tried a million other styles and versions of it, didn't like them, and then eventually came back to my original idea and made it work. After all, since the name of the game is "Global Gladiators," it would be a crime not to remix it with a level of ethnicity... especially since I love writing that way.

I did try going all out and bringing in kotos, bagpipes, steel drums, and other manner of exotic fare, but it just didn't work. So I kept the whole Native vibe, and I liked it. Mingled into this song are South American Andes Pan Flutes, Native North American chanting, Maori (New Zealand) chanting, African Kalimbas, Brazilian Berimbaus, and more. All over an electronic jungle fusion. It's fast, it's hyper, and it stands out from the other tracks on the album in a way that's kinda cool.

This remix came about as a direct request from Tommy Tallarico himself, considering this is the first game soundtrack that he ever won an award for. Hope ya like it dude. And congrats.

14. "K-Pax for Evermore"

Okay. If you haven't heard the soundtrack to the feature film "K-Pax," by Edward Shearmur, you are missing out. It is awesome. It sucked me in from the moment I put in the DVD, and I daresay it dwarfs the movie in coolness. Shearmur's blending of piano, mallet instruments, pads, and groovy electronic percussion is just so friggin' cool.

When first listening to the Secret of Evermore soundtrack by Jeremy Soule, I knew I wanted to remix this track in emulation of the K-Pax style. It just made sense to me.

It was actually very hard to do. It took me several tries to get started. I just couldn't settle on the right samples... but I stuck with it, and kept trying. Eventually I got a flow going, and then I ran with it. I even took it in directions that Shearmur didn't go, mingling in screaming synth leads, Reichian minimalist sections, and even a bit of Michael Manring electric bass influence. The end result is a soothing yet kickass remix of a great song. I'm quite proud of this one.

15. "Opening to Hell"

Some people use guitars, pianos, and drums to make music. I use the screams and moans of tortured souls. Bwuhaha.

From the moment I considered remixing this piece, I knew I wanted to make it scary. Like, chill-inducing scary. And what better way to do that than to create a soundscape of Hell? Fire, screams, demons, cries of pain, sounds of suffering... and all on top of guitars, organs, strings, choir and industrial percussion. Yes, I am quite twisted. And creating this 8-minute epic masterpiece of horror was a fun evil time.

Many thanks to Mustin and Kassi for providing additional scream action.

Extra Info

Added by Rimo on Mar 16, 2008 02:21 PM Edited by Rimo on Mar 16, 2008 02:50 PM