Key 13

Pretending to be a musician...
Pretending I know what I'm doing...
Everything mismatched and inconsistent...

Pretentious Incongruity.

About this release

Many of the tracks on this compilation were chosen to mark specific milestones or achievements in the lifetime of Key 13, while some slipped in almost by mistake! A few tracks aren't here (e.g. Sunbeams, Prompt Engineering), because they belong on their own self-contained, less incongruous (but still just as pretentious), future album or EP release.

Everything here has been remixed and remastered, a few have been slowed down as well. It seems that making tracks with the drums too loud, or indeed, with every instrument too loud (how on earth does that work!) is a feature of Key 13's sound! That's still the case here, and I have a feeling these new masters are all a bit bassy, but hopefully everything is at least a bit more consistently bad rather than quite so random as before.

You can stream, download and purchase it here:

• Mirlo – stream for free, or buy lossless downloads – 50% of proceeds go to Mirlo
• Faircamp – stream, or free high quality MP3 downloads
• Bandcamp – stream or buy lossless downloads
• Bandwagon – streaming only at present

Here's some info about each of them, which you may, or may not, find interesting.

Solarpunk Grazers

“Today I learned that a lot of large solar farm owners use sheep herds to maintain their grass and they’re called solarpunk grazers and life seems a little better.” – Kenn White

The best Key 13 track? Well, that depends on your taste.. but this one has to be up there, and definitely needs to open the collection. Orignally made for the Fedivision Song Contest 2023, it came joint sixth out of 40+ entries, which I was blown away with – I didn't expect anyone to even listen past the first few bars, let alone vote for it. But I'm pretty proud of it – lyrically and structurally it's not a bad song. I think this is definitely the best mix yet, although still a bit sharp and the bass is too loud? Oh well.

Influences: Believe it or not, I was listening to a lot of Broken Social Scene at the time, and was trying to capture some of their sound. I know, it's nothing like that. But if it works, don't knock it.

Tick Tock

Probably not to everyone's taste, this one – but one of my personal favourites. Not least because the lyrics are highly personal, and I really enjoyed making it. So much so that I included two very self-indulgent improvisations. It could definitely be edited down to a 3 minute single, but I like it this way. Originally written for /r/songaweek, theme “Tempo Change” – it slows down gradually through the final two phases.

Part of a really productive month or two, along with L.U.C.A and several others.

Influences: John Foxx, Ultravox.

Seventh Friend

A bit of an outlier – nearly didn't make it on. But, like many other tracks here, it marks a significant milestone. This was the first track I submitted to the Reddit sub /r/songaweek, with the weekly theme 'Seventh'. This sub proved to be the catalyst for a really long run of creativity. Just as importantly was the fact I wrote and finished it from scratch in just two days over a weekend – after a long dry period with no energy or ability to finish anything. It followed soon after Lateral Flow, and shares the phased side-guitar patches at the end of that track. The main arpeggiated theme came about when I was playing with one of the Logic Pro presets, but managed to get it triggering slightly off the beat.

This new mix slows it down a bit, and reduces the drums and piano somewhat in volume as they were way too loud on the original.

The title comes from Covid-19 terminology. At one point during the UK lockdown, we were restricted to no more than six people meeting together, the so called “Rule of Six”. I always wondered how many people found out they were the seventh friend at that point...

Influences: I have no idea... some random 90s chillout compilations? Robert Miles or Chicane? Who knows.

L.U.C.A.

Listening back, this one has quite a cluttered arrangement (I guess like every other Key 13 track!), but I love the “sound” I managed to get. I'd bought a vocal sample pack for a track called Drinking the Tears of Sleeping Birds a few weeks earlier, so needed to get my money's worth out of it. Also made use of a free sax+trumpet loops pack from Plugin Boutique.

I didn't have to tweak the mix much for this version – reduced the vocals a bit and sorted out an overly-enthusiastic hi hat.

The theme is a reference to the fact that all known life on earth shares some portion of DNA, implying there must have been one single amoeba-like ancestor from whom everything descended.

It was written for /r/songaweek – the theme was a chord sequence, ii-V-I, which I cycled round to I-ii-V then completely subverted into my favourite Phrygian mode (spoiler: it isn't really ii-V-I at all!).

Influences: The Budos Band, Portishead

The Space Between the Sea and the Sky

Another candidate for best Key 13 track? Listening to this collection together, there's clearly some lingering influence from Furloughed, but I think this one is much better put together. When creating this I deliberately set myself two goals:

1. don't use any chords on the same instrument (single notes only, or octaves) and
2. don't consciously follow any specific scale or pattern when putting the note sequences together.

The result is a somewhat random sequence of notes, on top of which I added bass and suspended arpeggios to help give it structure. The guitar-like bass patch is one I used a while before, on Invertebration (that later became As the Sun Sets Over the Water). I used Izotope's Vinyl plugin to give the lead electric piano a slightly warbling tone, plus an erratic delay preset.

I already remastered this for the Sea · Sky · Clouds EP but I now hate that mastering, far too bright and too loud, so this one went back to the original mix. I tweaked a little bit, not much, but had to comp several renders of the bubbling synth instrument to get it to sound close to the original.

Influences: Boards of Canada is where I was aiming – didn't get close, but there you go.

Hic et Nunc

My cheerful little ditty about the dangers of ignoring climate change.

Another one that I really like but I suspect not many others do. Particularly the ending here gets me every time – that last stanza feels like one of the best things I've written. The tribal drums throughout the first part have never been quite right for the track though, and I've reduced the volume in this mix to try to fix that a bit – I think this is the best version of this so far. Yes, the bass is meant to be that loud, Deal with it.

The title is so pretentious it hurts – Latin for “Here and Now” which features in the lyrics. The choir plugin (Aurora, also used in Tick Tock) was the only one I had at the time (I got it very cheap in a sale – the full price is astronomical!). While it's really expressive, it can only chant fragments of Latin words that make up the first verse of Dies Irae, for reasons best known to the creators. So I recombined them to sing vid irae solis favilla which, very loosely, means something like “Watching the ashes of the Sun's wrath”.

Don't tell me it's not valid Latin – I could only work with the fragments I had!

Influences: Tears For Fears, Peter Gabriel. Maybe even Phil Collins with those gated reverb drums at the end.

City Lights

I had so much trouble with this mix that it nearly didn't make it onto the album. I'm still not sure which mix I actually mastered in the end. So cluttered, so many channel strips, so much reverb, such artificial vocals.. too fast as well, so this is slowed down slightly.

But, it had to be here, because this is the very first track I made with artificial vocals. I'd written Doomscrolling a couple of weeks before, with my own vocals, and didn't enjoy the experience at all. I also knew I'd never be able to make the type of music I wanted with my own singing alone, so I thought – I'm using virtual pianos, and virtual guitars, and virtual synths – why not a virtual vocalist?

I tried a few different ones, but Emvoice was the only one which I felt sounded half realistic, and fit my workflow. This one is deliberately supposed to sound artificial – I wanted that feel, but it does sound a bit odd now, listening back. Their vocalist “Lucy” was the only female one they had at the time, and she's a bit primitive compared to the later “Keela” you'll hear on many other tracks here, but she has a softer voice which works better on some tracks.

Music-wise – more Phrygian mode again in the chorus. There's a lot going here in the structure – the stop-start-jumpiness works for me but probably annoys everyone else. The random mix of 80s dark wave synths and shoegazey guitars seemed like a good idea at the time. The lyrics come from the /r/songaweek theme for that week which was “Rain”. The original fades out, and that was how it was written, but I really like that closing section so I included it all here and added a little bit more to fade out with. Some of the guitar patches are re-used from Doomscrolling which I'd just written a bit earlier.

Influences: Kraftwerk, My Bloody Valentine, lots of other random 80s bands.. Depeche Mode maybe? Someone said it sounds like The Smiths, but I don't hear it.

Shadow Biosphere

I really like this. The /r/songaweek theme was “Reverse”, so I exported all the stems from L.U.C.A. and reversed them all. I then chopped them all up and moved them around until they made some kind of sense.

The title is a play on the science – some people postulate there may be other life on earth that we haven't found yet, maybe hiding in the deep sea, caves underground, or buried in ice, that doesn't descend from L.U.C.A. This alternative family tree is known as the Shadow Biosphere.

Influences: no clue. This one's all Key 13.

Doomscrolling

Key 13 does shoegaze. I've listened to a lot of Shoegaze and Dream Pop over the years – MBV, Ride, Kitchens of Distinction, Cocteau Twins and some more recent additions like Airiel, M83 and the amazing Amusement Parks On Fire. This was my attempt to do something in that vein – I honestly don't know quite where the exact style came from.

It's important to include here as it's the first track I actually sang on, myself. It's the first real “song” I ever wrote, with lyrics and everything. I don't think I did too badly although the mix is terrible, even this updated version. Everything is far too loud and there's more reverb than most people would use in a lifetime. Believe it or not, the reverb is substantially dialled down here from the original!

The tempo change in the middle was to meet that week's /r/songaweek theme – I think it works quite well, but it makes it a song of two halves.

The track was written around the time Russia invaded Ukraine. After two years of the pandemic, following years of political turmoil in the UK due to Brexit, I'd been increasingly finding that my interaction with social media had been reduced to scrolling through (then) Twitter, getting angrier and more depressed by the day. The only sane path of action seemed to be to turn away and isolate – physically, to avoid the virus, and mentally/socially to avoid having to deal with the outside world. The title and lyrics attempt (very crudely) to capture this feeling.

I didn't regain confidence with social media until later in the year when I discovered Mastodon – Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter being the final catalyst for change. Finally, there was somewhere I could actively engage again, rather than passively doomscrolling.

Influences: see above.

Furloughed

The oldest track here, written in the heart of the first Covid-19 lockdown. I wasn't actually furloughed myself (temporarily laid off work) but many people were, and I imagine the ups and downs of this track might reflect their feelings. I was lucky enough to be able to work from home on full pay, with 4 hours per day less commuting time that could be recycled into music creation...

This one is important, as it represents the first time I thought I might be able to, you know, write something vaguely interesting and original. Yes, it's so high pitched it hurts the ears, even in this radically remixed version, and fading in the drums is a bit random, to say the least(!) but that ending crescendo was the first time I'd captured a sort of .. almost euphoric feeling that I love in other tracks. Well, for me, anyway – I guess your opinions may differ.

Influences: I think I was aiming for something post-rock-y, with maybe Sigur Ros overtones. My partner thinks it sounds more like Tubular Bells, so go figure.

Misaligned Aardvarks

Where to start with this one.. Firstly, I'm really not a fan, especially of the arrangement and mix, which I just can't get right. I'm not sure this new mix is any better than the original – it might be worse. But it has to be here, it's the one everyone knows, because somehow, against all odds, it won the 2024 Fedivision Song Contest!! How on earth did that happen. I still feel they gave me someone else's votes.

It all came from a throwaway conversation between two contacts on Mastodon (inpc and elsemusic), who have probably been mystified about the whole thing ever since.

I had the opening section from around December of the previous year, up to when the guitar comes in – this came out of playing around with the presets in one of Cherry Audio's Moog emulations (Memorymode, I think) – but had got stuck there for months. I had the main vocal line in my head but didn't have any of the words, and didn't know where the rest of the track was going – nor how the aardvarks got out of their conundrum! I did know, from the start, that it was going to be my Fedivision entry for the year – although I thought it would probably come in as an epic long track, and would need to be edited down to meet the 4:00 max length for the competition.

In the spring of 2024 I got fixated on getting out an EP called Sea · Sky · Clouds, remastering some earlier tracks of mine – I don't know why (see: Monotropism, also referenced later on!) but I just couldn't focus on anything else musical until I got this released. Finally on April 25th, I got it out. However, there was also the little matter of the Not Bonk What I Call Wave: Remixes album release which needed to go out on May 10th, and although others were doing most of the work, I still had to prepare the audio files and do the Faircamp release.

When the Fedivision call for entries came around, the submission period ran from 5th to the 12th May, but I had the above Bonk Wave release planned and was about to go on holiday, so I was cutting it a bit fine. I was also on a tough project at work which was sapping my energy – I was generally struggling a bit. In the end, the whole thing was completed in just one session, during the only spare time I had – a few hours, late into the evening, on the 6th May. I knew the mix was really bad, pretty much unlistenable, so somehow managed to find more time one evening midweek (getting myself into trouble as I should have been doing something else – e.g. packing for holiday!) to spend another hour or two fixing it up a little before finally getting it submitted on the 8th. Luckily (and hugely coincidentally!) it had come in at exactly the same length as my previous entry, well under 4 minutes, so no editing down required.

Given how rushed the whole process had been, I wasn't holding out much hope. When the Fedivision entry list came out, not only were there 71 other entries (!) which was astonishing, but mine was literally number 72, last on the playlist. The chances of anyone even getting to it through 4 hours of music were pretty slim.

As the results were announced, from position 10 downwards, I prepared for the worst. When we got to number 2 and I still hadn't been mentioned, I thought that was it. But somehow, miraculously, there it was.. number 1! I still have no idea how, or why – there were several objectively-better tracks there. So sorry to all the other entries, you have my deepest apologies.

Influences: There's a lot going on – I was trying to capture the sound of some early Italian 70s progressive rock bands – especially Premiata Forneria Marconi, but the vocals are clearly styled after Yes. It's been pointed out there's some Marillion flavours as well, which is fair enough.

Mournography

I wrote most of this in a few hours while hiding upstairs as the rest of the family watched the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II live on TV. it had been preceded by days of the most bizarre thing (to me) I'd ever seen – thousands and thousands of people queued, for miles, for hours and days, just to be able to file past a closed wooden box which may, or may not, have contained a dead body. I had nothing against the Queen (although I'm not a fan of the Royal Family in general!) but this whole thing left me speechless.

I imagined life as just one long queue.. everyone striving to get to the end, but when they get there, finding nothing.

Composition-wise this could be one of my best, the way it flows together, never lingering too long on any particular phrase. I intended to sing it myself, but there were too many other family members around in the house at the time, so you got Emvoice Jay.

Influences: Pink Floyd. Far too much of their sound here, not especially original. Possibly also Porcupine Tree but they were quite Floyd-influenced at the start anyway.

Lateral Flow

A real milestone this one. After making great progress throughout 2020, the following year was a bit of a creative hole. Finally, in early 2022, I managed to get this track finished. Soon after, I discovered /r/songaweek, and music flowed for months. I actually quite like this new mix – one of the few here that I am fairly certain sounds better than the original.

Influences: I'd just bought Cherry Audio's “Quadra” synth, which emulates a real instrument used a lot by Tony Banks from Genesis, so you can see where the influence comes from here. The fifth-harmonic guitar sound was a preset from an AAS plugin, styled after Allan Holdsworth.

Synalgesy

Why is this on here? Actually I'm not sure. It got chosen for an internet radio show at one point, so someone liked it, and it was in circulation on the sadly missed Radio Free Fedi for a while. But for me, there's nothing to stand out much. It was written for an /r/songaweek theme of “TV Theme Tune” which I set myself, so I've got no-one else to blame.

The title is a made up word, courtesy of the interesting project called Lyre's Dictionary. This is a computer program that produces plausible sounding English words, with definitions, based on combining word fragments and stems. In this case, the definition was: “the act or state of feeling pain together”, which I thought was a word we really could find some use for.

Influences: Who knows, a thousand electronic musicians.

Children of Broken Code

One of only two tracks on here that feature me singing, with my real voice. I included this as something a bit different, one of my more recent creations. I think it stands up pretty well.

The intermediate refrain on piano, that is repeated with heavy distortion towards the end, is a 12-tone note sequence. The rest of the track is written in a Phrygian Dominant scale – Phrygian mode with a major third.

“Fault 72” is a reference to a real life issue some relatives were having with their central heating boiler! It was going to be the track title, but I think the current one works better. Our future descendents will definitely blame us for the mess, whether it's this cyberpunk dystopia or something even worse.

Influences: Gary Numan, in his later/current more industrial period.

Monotropic

I've been trying to make a decent minimalist track for a while, and I think I got part way there with this one. I'm quite pleased with the way it ebbs and flows, changing time signatures and themes gradually with polyrhythms along the way.

The title is a nod to a new way of understanding neurodivergence, yet to gain widespread clinical adoption but finding a lot of support amongst neurodivergent folk in how it explains their (our?) experiences. The track itself is intended to be reminiscent of a flow state – able to drive forward, adapting slowly and introducing new elements without losing the thread of deep concentration.

This was intended to be the first of several tracks in a series, exploring similar themes, but the rest have not (yet) shown any signs of manifesting so it's included here because it has nowhere else to go.

Influences: Steve Reich

Heretic

I couldn't get away without including some #BonkWave on here. From the very first compilation, Not What I Call Bonk Wave Volume 001, this was created in quite a short period of time. The theme harks back to the origins of Bonk Wave – overzealous Genre Police, gatekeeping every microstyle of music to the nth degree. Our luckless Heretic is judged before his peers, and found wanting.

I've never been able to mix it properly – and nearly gave up this time round. No matter how much I turn down the drums and bass, they're always too loud. This mix has every instrument too loud – how can that even happen?!! But it has to be here.

At the time this was my most complex project in Logic Pro – it has nearly 100 channel strips with all the different FX and silly voices. Mixing it this time though I was able to strip it back to the 10 or so instrument tracks before worrying about everything else, and turned down the FX a bit to make the music clearer. I think, at least, the Polymoog Vox Humana patch is not quite so ear-splitting as it was on the original.

Influences: Some random psychedelic bands from the 1960s, maybe even The Beatles, and Gary Numan in his 80s period, who knows what else!

Road With No Name

This collection always had to close with this. Created barely 6 months after I bought my nanoKEY2, it was the first track I created that sounded (if you squint a bit) like it might have been made with real instruments. It's highly self-indulgent and far too long, but I'm actually quite pleased with this new mix, and as we started the album in 7/8 time, it makes sense to end in 7/8 as well.

Why did I use a virtual acoustic double bass instead of an electric bass? I have no idea – and it's just a Logic Pro preset rather than any sophisticated emulation. But I think it works? This track was recorded before I had discovered Ample Sound's amazing virtual guitars, so it uses an Applied Acoustics Systems (AAS) plugin called Strum GS-2. This uses physical modelling of sound rather than samples, and it's just not quite as convincing, falling in some not-quite-guitar uncanny valley – but it sounded great to me at the time.

The original version fades, but when I opened up the project I realised it did actually have an ending, so I kept it this time. I also slowed it down slightly and drastically reduced the mellotron flute sound which was overwhelming before.

The road in the title, and as pictured in the cover photo, genuinely appears to have no name. We used to walk down it quite a lot during Lockdown as it was quiet and a convenient route to get to more green spaces.

Influences: Caravan, Camel