Dan Warren

This is a song that I actually wrote decades ago. Only a couple of people have ever heard it, and there's a reason for that; I feel like it's too easy for this one to be misunderstood, and I didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings with it. But with the election today I'm really feeling this pretty hard right now about the entirety of the USA, and if ever there was a time when I was ready to say "fuck it, if anyone gets mad that's their problem" it's right now. But do let me say this: make sure you listen to the whole thing. It's a simple song about a complicated emotion, and you haven't heard all of it until you've heard all of it. I grew up in Oklahoma feeling like I never really fit in there. When I left for other parts of the world that feeling was confirmed for me; it's not just that I'm generally a depressing misanthrope (although I am that too), it really was just a poor match between a person and a place. I just didn't fit there politically, religiously, or in basically any other way that doesn'

I'm working on a bunch of new music that I'm not ready to post yet, so for now here's a lovely soundscape from this morning, recorded at my little rental house on Lake Hume. It was a very rainy morning, and an Aussie magpie was hanging out in the tree right outside my window, quietly talking to itself about all the worms it was planning to eat once the rain went away. It's out there in the yard now, making the dream come true.

Just messing around with some random short vocal snippets from a Youtube tutorial on Japanese grammar by Cure Dolly. Bass is Venus Theory's excellent foghorn sample library for Spitfire Labs.

Just a quick and dirty living room demo I recorded on my iPad of something I'm working on. Give me your credit cards I wanna buy you a gift Down at the grocery store I'll need a lift It's too far for walking And I've had a few But I wanna buy something Really special for you No, I won't buy more than you'd allow I think I know you well enough by now I heard your new record It's really not bad You get so much mileage Out of always being sad You use the finest materials To frame your broken heart So that all of the tourists Will think you're this work of art But you know I don't buy your stories anyhow I think I know you well enough by now The last time I saw you You were walking home alone I offered to drive you but you said The city knows its own I said "that's a good line, sunshine, take a fucking bow, and I think I know you well enough by now"

This is a bunch of instrumental music I made for a documentary called River Runner many years ago, just sort of stuffed together in one track.

I don't know why I made this either but here it is.

This is a track I did for the Frog Fractions 2 ARG, it was meant to be an artifact from the remains of the civilization of Bug Mars. It's a song of mourning in the last days of a dying civilization. Lyrics: There was no war, there was no victory No grand defeat to make some sense of the Things that we lost, things that we gave for free Because we never understood That when it's gone, it's gone for good The sparkles kill and then they fade away The heart grows still amid the world's decay Even the atmosphere has bled away And still we never understood That when it's gone, it's gone for good

Sometimes I like to just sit down and build a generative music machine that makes pretty noises. This was one of those days, and this is the result.

Just a little instrumental thing I bashed together while learning to use Playbox

This is the instrumental track for a song I have still never recorded. I wrote the song near the end of 2020. It's about reassuring yourself that the currently horrible world events are temporary. It was a sort of cross between optimism and intentional irony, and of course 2021 turned out to suck even worse. Maybe one day I'll record it, but for now it just sort of sounds like Christmas shopping music that's been left out to decay in the sun for a few decades. Here's the lyrics: Christmastime Where'd the year go? Spent inside Living echoes An endless parade of identical moments that shuffle away, leaving no real impression at all, but Things will be better next year I know they will Things will be better next year Christmastime And I miss you Soon it won't be an issue Maybe by June we can meet in a restaurant surrounded by people and think nothing of it at all? Things will be better next year They have to be Things will be better next year

This is just a rough draft of a ridiculous thing I built from a Librivox audiobook of an old book called "The Book of the Damned", by Charles Hoy Fort. The chapters these samples were taken from were read by Matthew Shepherd.

Welp I set out to just make a nice little western thing and it ended up sounding way too much like Gorillaz. I swear it wasn't on purpose. Back to the drawing board.

Just a positive, relaxing, possibly slightly creepy message for you

Just a quick little guide for self-hypnosis and acupuncture.

I'm tired of not understanding Japanese, so I made a machine to do it for me. It's just a sampler fed with random syllables from my Pimsleur Japanese lessons, with the two voices occasionally asking each other if they understand and forlornly responding that they don't.

This is a very old track, basically a found poem taken from a vocabulary building record from the 80s. It (in my mind) tells the story of a relationship that starts off strong but gets weird and creepy, and ends with them parting with no real lessons learned.

I was messing around in bitwig with a rhythmic pattern I learned from karnatic music and I think I accidentally made prog. Lyrics: bwoooop booop peeeoww weeeener neeeener

Last week I was playing around with sampling some sounds from an old data cassette as well as an XDR toneburst. I ended up using those sampler instruments to flesh out a bit of music I'd already been working on, and the end result sounds like a discarded and poorly weathered cassette of some old video game music.

This track is me sort of exploring the idea that quantum foam and the big bang imply that the universe absolutely cannot tolerate the existence of true nothingness. There can be nothing, but not for long. Sort of encouraging, in a perverse way. Anyway it takes a long time to get started; the track began as sort of an experiment in building music out of environmental noise. Lyrics: Can you call it vacuum, the spaces between spaces where there were never things? Can you call it darkness, the absence of a light that never has been seen? Either by sheer providence or through some strange technology, nothing never lasts forever; something comes to be. At its core, true nothingness is riddled with instability, simply as a consequence of some innate geometry. So in the end the emptiness is an impossibility. Nothing never lasts forever; something comes to be.

This is just me playing with some sounds in Bitwig. The progression is fun because when it sounds like it's looping back to the beginning it's actually a step lower than it started out (hence the name). The other neat thing about this one is that the super funky electric piano bit that starts at 1:30 is just running the same chords through two different arpeggiators - it happened entirely on accident but I decided I liked it.