Dan Warren

It’s quiet out here Look for the sun, I can’t find it out here And all that dumb shit that they told us about our manifest destiny Is gone and forgotten now And sure, our goals are pure What good does that do out here? I’m not sure And looking back now at that comic book future we used to believe in So foolish in hindsight, I see We’re only survival machines Connected like mother and child Each needing the other to thrive It’s all or it’s none that survive Gone in the night, all sense of purpose A thin veil of lies that just lay on the surface And I long to unload this cargo of corpses And own my own life

I feel like I'm finally nearing the end of production on my album Evergreen; everything is recorded, and now it's just a question of final mixing and mastering. Here's a more or less final version of the song that started it all, Sail or Anchor. Fun fact: much of the percussion is recordings of Ann Druyan's brain waves from the Voyager golden record, combined with tiny (< 1 second) snippets of ASMR videos ripped from Youtube. Lyrics: I can't describe what I see in this light with my eyes wide open Almost divine so real and so right so loud unspoken And it falls on me soft like a frosty morning Blurs the outline it's too close to be seen like the act of blinking Hard to define It's just a thing that you are Without even thinking And you'll always be what I need, be it sail or anchor I'd gladly fight so hard for this love, but you make it easy If you can't get by on your own anymore then you know that you can Look to your side and you'll know that I'm there and you know that you can Call on me to be w

This is a very rough demo of a song I've been working on. I recorded it on my iPhone, playing the piano that I learned on as a child. It's in bad repair these days and sounds like it, but it has a special place in my heart. The song is about the aftermath of an alien abduction where a couple have had something installed in them that will record their thoughts and memories, and that in some strange way connects them to each other. They weren't supposed to be aware of it, but at least one of them is. Lyrics: When the stars came closer We were all at first afraid But when the night was over We only wished that they had stayed Tell me, have I grown transparent? Can everybody see right through my skin? And are my bones apparent? Does everybody know where I have been? They've taken something from me And left a vacuum in its place A mouth that's always hungry An absence nothing can replace It's something that we owe each other A fire that burns eternal, bright It's a part of us that lives forever Far from thes

This is not really meant to be a track per se, just demonstrating a proof of concept. This is essentially taking the idea behind Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting In A Room" and faking it by chaining the same reverb over and over again instead of repeated recordings in a real space. Then I'm basically turning those reverbs on and off rhythmically while running a drum loop through them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAxHlLK3Oyk&ab_channel=TrilobiteJuice

Okay this is a sad one. I wrote this song about four years ago when I was approaching the end of a postdoc fellowship and didn't yet have another job lined up, and was contemplating what to do if I wasn't able to continue my academic career. At the same time I was talking to my family back home about how my brother's health was failing, and the abysmal quality of care he was receiving because he had the misfortune of being poor in America's healthcare system. I wrote this song in maybe thirty minutes and recorded it in the voice memos on my iPad so that I'd remember it. It's not precisely about his situation or mine, but it's not NOT about that either. For some reason the other day this song came back into my head, and I thought about rerecording it. When I went back to the iPad recording from four years ago, though, I found that I really liked it despite how noisy and rough it was - there was something about getting it down when all of those feelings were fresh that I really liked. So in the end I jus

Hypnospace Outlaw OST vol. 3 is out, including a bunch of songs from me! They're also included in the new content update, which should be dropping on Steam and elsewhere today! This track is an alt-rock reworking of my song for the initial release, Satellite. https://jtholen.bandcamp.com/album/hypnospace-outlaw-ost-vol-3 Lyrics: Back when we were both young and pretty Oh, you had so much to say But things weren't perfect in the city So now you've moved away And my my, look how your star has faded You spend the night at home Practicing your drums for a gig that never comes Casting dirty glances at the phone You've still got mountains in your mind You never even tried to climb You never seemed to have the time You know you used to shine so bright Was that all reflected light? Were you just a satellite? Lord knows, these things get so confusing When you have flown so far Back home the almond trees are blooming But it's autumn where you are And my my, now all the leaves are changing Just like the color of

Everybody loves a good swing cover of a modern song, right?

I decided to see whether I could use the R package "googleLanguageR" to use Google's API for speech-to-text and automate my sampling process for my spoken word fuckery. Answer: very yes. This is just me playing around for a few minutes with clips from Attenborough's "Life Stories".

Here's a draft of a song for Evergreen. Musically it started as an exercise in writing nonfunctional harmony. I've probably pulled this one apart and put it back together more than any other song I've made in recent memory, and I'm still not entirely sure I'm satisfied with it. Lyrics: Brittle fragment of a memory Still and silent over centuries Wake, my love, and greet me Wake, my love, and never never go again Do not forsake me Love, do not forsake me Awaken to me Take a breath now Hesitation is the enemy Every instant is a victory Wake, my love, and greet me Wake, my love, I swear it I swear it can be Everything you wanted Everything forever Forever's not so long Forever's not so long

This is currently slated to be the last track on Evergreen. It's a reprise of the first song, Survival Machines. Regardless of whether anyone else ever likes it, Evergreen is a project I've grown so personally attached to that it's just getting harder and harder for me to be completely satisfied with the arrangement and mix of any given track. Nonetheless, this is one of the ones that I think is closest to exactly what I wanted it to be. Lyrics: And so we hold tight to a lone mote of dust in the infinite night straining ourselves just to cling to the surface our singular purpose to stay side by side and what does it mean that they could have used fear or almost anything but love is lever they've chosen to move us to shape and improve us to keep our lives evergreen? Does that make us survival machines connected like mother and child each needing the other to thrive it's all or it's none that survive

Here's a new take on my song Wretched Beast, with some lovely harmonies provided by Tanja Manners. It still needs a bit of mixing work, but I'm going to be traveling for a while and decided to go ahead and post the rough track because it's darn pretty.

This is just a quick sketch of a song that's still only half-written. I basically sat down to record this just to make sure I wouldn't forget the vocal arrangement I'd thought of, but I ended up liking the way it came out enough to share it. Lyrics: The next time we see each other we will know this dance by heart and we'll do it in that instant, no matter where we are If it's a thousand years before we do, I promise I'll still recognize you Because I hear you in the evening when the crickets sing good night and I see you in the morning in the flicker of the light In every single thing I see and do, in some small way I recognize you You're burned into me deep For everything I keep forgetting I will always recognize you I don't believe in heaven, but I'd be happy to be wrong I'd like to think that somehow you and I will carry on Whatever life may turn us both into, I know I'll always recognize you

Just a weird little song I came up with as an experiment. I actually had the idea for the weird vocal sound first and wrote the song around it, and I think it worked out surprisingly well for having been written from the top down like that. The percussion is mostly one of Sound Dust's chaos engine thingies, and that lovely synth in the chorus is Samplephonics' Dirty Modular. Lyrics: At the bottom of the ocean There are colors nobody sees You have your own, in unguarded moments You share with me You let me see There's a certain smallest distance That is allowed by electricity Staying within those physical limits Come close to me Just as close as you can be Come closer Take and surround me Gently Please come close to me At the moment of creation When everything was just energy There was a process set in motion To bring you to me Just as close as you can be Come closer Take and surround me Gently Please come close to me

yospos bithc

It's been a while since I've uploaded something, and unfortunately I'm traveling again so I can't record much at the moment. Until I get something else put together, here's a noisy living room recording of a song I've never released before. I threw this together in Australia as a demo just so I wouldn't forget the song, and I've been meaning to get back to it for years now.

This is a track I did for Jay Tholen's new video game, Hypnospace Outlaw. Within the game, the song is by an imaginary 90's alt-folk band called Barnaby's Chair. https://store.steampowered.com/app/844590/Hypnospace_Outlaw/ Lyrics: Back when we were both young and pretty Oh, you had so much to say But things weren't perfect in the city So now you've moved away And my my, look how your star has faded You spend the night at home Practicing your drums for a gig that never comes Casting dirty glances at the phone You've still got mountains in your mind You never even tried to climb You never seemed to have the time You know you used to shine so bright Was that all reflected light? Were you just a satellite? Lord knows, these things get so confusing When you have flown so far Back home the almond trees are blooming But it's autumn where you are And my my, now all the leaves are changing Just like the color of your hair Time flies, soon everything looks strange and A chill is in the air You've still got mount

This is a slightly rearranged and remastered version of something I've uploaded before. I think it's close enough to a final version as makes no difference at this point. Lyrics: Oh you temporary thing departing since the moment you arrived you know you can't survive this on your own you solitary thing now reaching out in hopes that you will find that another of your kind is reaching too Some signal in the static peeking through; there's something out there looking out for you and hey, you know it might be true You ordinary thing, less different than you want to believe yet terrified to leave your gun at home, you sedentary thing now dying only inches from your birth the master of the earth for all you knew You looked around and found nothing to do but never thought to blame your point of view and say, "you know this can't be true" "There must be more than this a message that we missed I just know somehow this can't be all, this can't be all" Oh no, you broken nameless thing cast up in ragged pieces on

Lemme get pompous for a second: I've always loved the idea of the unreliable narrator in music, because I think people are a lot less prepared for it in that situation than they typically are when reading prose, watching a movie, or something like that. I think there's something about setting words to music that tends to circumvent people's skepticism and perceive the lyrics as fundamentally honest, rather than as a work of fiction. Having a first person perspective where the viewpoint is either unreliable or kind of a shithead is really interesting, because people tend to take that personally in a weird way. On that note, here's a song that starts off sounding like a take on the "I'm broken and you can fix me" school of love songs, but as it goes on you sorta realize that the person in question isn't just emotionally screwed up but in fact mentally unstable. I had this idea of doing an entire album based around this idea, where it starts off as just a sort of romantic story but it turns out that the narr

I don't often post things that are this new and unpolished, but I haven't had much time to record lately and it's been a while since I posted something. It's a pretty simple song anyway, so it doesn't require much.

Just an old track that I put together as a test run for a project that I never really finished. Samples were taken from the audiobook of Almost Astronauts, by Tanya Lee Stone.