petriform
petriform
popplio enthusiast first, chiptune + synth music composer/performer second!
this is my music work blog! i messed up making this my primary blog, so if you want to see or follow my actual personal blog, click ~here~
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thank you Pacific Noise Works for a brilliant, unforgettable night! love you Seattle!!
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my chiptune album "Veneer" turns 10 years old today
this was a big one for me! i'd started performing Petriform shows a little under a year earlier, and had figured out the direction i wanted to take my music at that time - the intersection of drum & bass and chiptune, which i'd taken to calling "hybrid chip" or "chip hybrid" or something similar - not that it mattered. what sealed the deal was that not only was it what i had the most fun producing and performing, it seemed like what the audiences i was playing to responded to the most (at the time, i'd been performing songs from "Relentless Eventful" and some early "chip hybrid" odds and ends from my first explorations of FamiTracker). so i was on the come-up, and had a clear vision toward something that seemed like it was going to come together really well.
and it did! "Veneer" is by most metrics (nebulously) my second-most successful album. by a very thin margin, it's the #1 most-downloaded item on my bandcamp. its release kicked off what would be my most active year of live performances, and took me to places i cherish to this day (my first 8bitsf and 8bitLA shows were both "Veneer" era).
so how do i feel about it now? you know that splatoon concept art, the "inkling development process?" with "Veneer" i feel like i was the second squid from the left. maaaaybe the one in the middle. i was throwing a lot of stuff at the wall, and what stuck was yet to be fully-refined. my vocoder, previously debuting on "Brown Plaid" less than two months earlier (yes, i released two full-length albums nearly back-to-back and very suddenly had Nothing™ cooking) made its chiptune debut here on the very first track ("Intercontinental Drift") and then... did not appear musically on the entire rest of the album. 👍 "Intercontinental Drift" has some fun polyrhythmic stuff at the end, which i hadn't done much of before, and that solo sounds close to something i'd bust out today, just with less interesting instruments and programming. on the rest of the album, there's pianos, amen breaks, supersaws, you name it. a (very) loose thematic concept and leitmotif bookends all but the first few tracks, trying to convey the imagery of the album art - the core of a planet surfaced with the faux wood veneer(!) of retro electronics.
so what from this album has endured? "Vanilla Extract" and "Coastal" lasted several more years than the rest of the album among my live setlists, and even those got phased out eventually (though "Vanilla Extract" remains my third-most performed song, despite not being in almost five years! i'm playing in seattle tomorrow; i should fix that...). "Coastal" in particular was such a signature song for me that it got a reprise, a new arrangement, and was the soft concept of "Dither Beach" six years later. all but two songs from the album ended up getting performed at some point, though by the end of 2015 they'd been phased out in favor of newer material (namely the stuff that would form my self-titled album and "Don't Worry, You're Great!"). on the one-year anniversary of the album's release, i played a six-song set with only one of those songs being from "Veneer." the "Veneer" era was 2014 - 2015, and that was it!
every album i've done since "Veneer" has been better than "Veneer", but it still has a particular charm, i think. it's the last release of mine that really committed to the whole "chip hybrid" thing; that went away around the same time most of the album did - late 2015. it's the first release that coincided with my growth as a live performer. it's "Veneer!"
listen to / download "Veneer" on bandcamp here
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just a week away!! seattle let's go!!!
seattle!! see you soon!!
(poster art by Dovahcaine)
beyond excited to share that i'll be performing in seattle at Pacific Noise Works's HEAT.wav at Substation on friday, february 2, alongside Faux Macro, WOEBGONE, and Danbala's Horse, w/ visuals by Glitch_Wolfe!
this is my first show in the PNW in almost 5 years, so i'm elated to be back and hope y'all in the area can come through! it's my first show in seattle, specifically, for that matter... so you know i'm gonna bring my very best!
see you there! 🎵✨
fb event | tickets
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seattle!! see you soon!!
(poster art by Dovahcaine)
beyond excited to share that i'll be performing in seattle at Pacific Noise Works's HEAT.wav at Substation on friday, february 2, alongside Faux Macro, WOEBGONE, and Danbala's Horse, w/ visuals by Glitch_Wolfe!
this is my first show in the PNW in almost 5 years, so i'm elated to be back and hope y'all in the area can come through! it's my first show in seattle, specifically, for that matter... so you know i'm gonna bring my very best!
see you there! 🎵✨
fb event | tickets
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running water (take care) / sink
celebrating 10 years of "brown plaid" with refreshed / alternate takes on two of that album's signature songs
(a retrospective post on that album is to follow soon!)
free / name your price on bandcamp
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"florence" was released two years ago today!
(and if youuuuu can believe it, it's a bandcamp friday once again!)
some cool "florence" things have happened in the year since i originally posted this:
the time and place were finally right for me to do a "florence"-heavy live set back in october, playing "administer and know peace," "no rx," "morale vampire," and "made" live for the first time. now, "vector control," "say,"* "underwrite," and "scanners" are the only ones i haven't played. (i'm still looking for an opportunity to perform the album in its entirety!)
also, at that show, i debuted "florence" special edition CDs! they include the "f-stop" companion EP too! for the time being, they'll only be generally available at live shows because ecommerce is a fucking pain not something i want to stop self-sabotaging dedicate a lot of time to at the moment. these are my first CDs since "nothing is for sure" in 2018, for what it's worth!**
anyway, "florence" remains my most-recent full-length chiptune album to date. it's going to stay that way for a while - the next album has been underway for some time, but it's a long way off, and it won't sound like "florence." like i said in the original post, it'll be a long time before i specifically follow this one up. that's why i keep plugging it two years later and counting - i know it's special, i know it will stay special, and i know that, like many things of mine, i vastly underpromoted it at the time. so, during a time in my life where i have less time to create and more time to reflect on what i could have done differently, hopefully you'll forgive me for going back to the proverbial "florence" well until i finally feel like i've done right by the "me" who spent seven years seeing it through.
"florence" is still free / name your price on bandcamp.
* "say" was the first song i wrote for the album and 2014 me would be aghast that it'd be one to go unplayed! it was supposed to be The™ song!
** yes, this leaves "dither beach" and my self-titled album CDless. maybe one day... maybe
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been playing lots of Super MaЯio RPG lately
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your Audio Doodles tag gave me as much dopamine as putting on an old hoodie and finding $20 in the pocket
thank you! glad to hear it! this prompted me to go through that tag because i'm pretty sure i haven't been using it consistently. and seeing as the last such tagged post was… six years ago… yeesh! i gotta go back and tag some more stuff!
at least some of that stuff went places! that "synthwave loop?" that got finished! it went onto an album of mine last year! (P.S. y'all who commented on the funny pendulum popcorn post wanting more, this album contains pretty much the only drum & bass i've released in the past decade, so that's the closest i can offer at the moment!)
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🎵🔊
i can't take a walk to clear my head introspectively anymore. i take a walk and any room for introspection is swiftly and forcibly infilled by Shit Like This, like a Peeps™ marshmallow in the world's smallest microwave
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thank you los angeles!! was good to be back! 💚
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I'm playing An Evening of Experimental Game Music at Suspirium Space in Los Angeles this Friday, 10/20!
My experiment? Well... I think Florence enjoyers will be happier than usual with the setlist 🎵👀
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wrote another tune for another Button Masher-hosted compo... Game Boy this time!
theme was "puzzle game theme!"
was crunched for time on this one and wanted to do more, but getting the exercise in is always worth it!! 💪
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wrote a comfy coffee shop SNES chiptune for a compo hosted by Button Masher! ☕
being as attached to FamiTracker as i am, this happens to be my first ever SNES tune, as well as my first using Furnace. there's a first time for everything, i suppose! still getting used to it!
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seems as good a time for a silly little cover of this as any 👽✨
y'all know any popular songs about uhhhhhh room temp superconductors by any chance
i don't actually feel any particular way about the "news" i just needed an excuse 🥺
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my new EP, "...especially any of this," is now available on bandcamp!
thank you all listening party attendees 💜
the bandcamp description goes into more detail, but to get right to the point: these are songs that were left on the cutting room floor of the "nothing is for sure" sessions and revisited for the five-year anniversary of that album. i wrote a lot of stuff for that album that didn't make it; more than i have for any album before or since! i think i did that material justice - you be the judge!
download free / pay what you want - enjoy!
(and if you happen to be attending MAGWest in a couple of weeks... swing by to see me! i'll be playing some of these new songs for sure!)
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sorry for the short notice (forgot to post...) but the youtube one is starting Imminently™
youtube
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celebrating five years of "nothing is for sure," a Big Post! live set and streaming playback stats, the story of "albacore song," and more!
"nothing is for sure" is now five years old! i still consider this to be my most consistent non-concept album (if you want concept albums, i'm begging you to listen to "florence"), and it remains a mainstay of my live setlists! "the jacket" continues to be a part of my ~brand identity™®~ five years on, though i've retired the specific jacket that is depicted - performing in that in the summer was Not Great! (a current depiction would see a vest with way, way more buttons.)
i was curious to see what the play stats looked like after these five years, especially in comparison to how i've treated the material in live sets over the same time period. this is gonna be a long, wildly self-indulgent post, but if i can't nerd out about my own shit, how can i expect anyone else to? and hey, there might be insights applicable for other independent musicians somewhere in here, maybe! (maybe?) so here are the stats!
all told, "nothing is for sure" looks to have attracted over 30,000 streamed plays between the four services i queried. i... wouldn't have imagined that! i'm not going to compare these numbers to any other album of mine because assembling the data takes work and i'm lazy! maybe for the next album anniversary! these numbers aren't inclusive of the instrumental versions, by the way.
as far as the live numbers go, looks like i've played songs from "nothing is for sure" 39 times over 15* live sets since 2017. eventually i'll finish porting my setlists into an actual database for ease of analysis, but today's not that day.
*it's 16; i played a set in february 2020 (oof) for which i've lost the setlist. it's not accounted for in these stats or anywhere else.
initial takeaways from these charts:
i'm really overdue to perform "gone without!" (okay, and "delete!delete!delete!" too, but i feel like that one is inflated by being track 2.) i've been aware that people like this one a lot, whereas i personally prefer most of the other songs on the album. i couldn't tell you why that is. i aaaaaalmost played it for the first time the last couple of sets, but switched it up at the last minute because i felt (and still feel) like it'll be difficult to perform (the verses are fast and long).
on that note, i DO plan to play every song off this album live at least once, and i've been slowly chipping away at that goal. god help me when i try to pull off "punch buggy slug bug" live; it'll almost certainly be the first and last time. i think i'll save "over like rover" for last - it's only fitting, right?
dang, now i have it in my head to just play a set that's just the album front to back. pls book me to do this 🥺 (but ideally book me to do "florence" in full first)
i dunno why spotify likes "pace yourself" in particular but thank you spotify listeners
in retrospect it's curious that neither i or the listening audience seem to regard "ahead of your time" relatively highly given that's the Song That Says The Album Title
all that said, here are some...
fun facts about "nothing is for sure" live:
the first "nothing is for sure" track i ever played live was "killian is lying to you" in march 2017 at DNA Lounge in san francisco - over 15 months before the album's release
this was the only song from the album i played live before its release.
the most recent "nothing is for sure" track i've played was "albacore song" just this past month (may 2023) in san jose, in a set that also included "stay (wish on a star)," "k7 (k9 - k2)," and (for the first time ever!) "wilson phillips screwdriver”
i've got a lot to say about "albacore song" later!
since the album's release, i've never gone a single set without playing a song from the album.
since the album's release, i've never gone a single set without playing "stay (wish on a star)" specifically. this wasn't on purpose. it's in my top 5 most-played-live songs and is creeping up on a few that i no longer play often.
even if i'd never played “stay (wish on a star),” the bullet point prior to that would still be true.
i've had multiple sets post-"Dither Beach" where i failed to play anything from "Dither Beach" but still played stuff from "nothing is for sure".
tell me about the downloads! the $ale$!
okay. without getting too specific, compared to my other full-length albums on bandcamp, "nothing is for sure" is the:
2nd highest-grossing*,
4th most-purchased,
5th most-downloaded.
(if you're wondering what the top albums are for those rankings, "Don't Worry, You're Great!" is all of them. the way things are going (streaming going up, downloads and CDs going down), ostensibly, it'll be that way for a long time.)
the parameters with which i personally measure "success" for my own projects are complicated, but "nothing is for sure" was a success.
*album downloads on my bandcamp are name-your-price. digital gross is pretty much entirely what folks feel like paying. this figure includes CD sales; without CD sales, it'd be 5th.
okay so what did you mean about "albacore song"
so people who've attended my live shows will know about this, but people who have only listened online might not!
i first played "albacore song" in july 2018 at DNA Lounge; the first show post-album-release. cool! that was the one and only time i played it... until chiptune colleague piecesofeight spun up a mashup thereof with Madonna's "Like a Prayer" that struck a chord with me.
so as a nod to that, and in service to my (wavering) habit of doing at least one cover per set, i played "albacore song" once more - again at DNA Lounge, three years later - but this time, i swerved into a cover of "Like a Prayer" for a couple minutes, and then back into the rest of "albacore song."
thus began a tradition of me using "albacore song" as a medley-riffic launchpad for covers that i invoke wherever I can! i'd done (and still do) similar stuff (swerving covers into "Super Dog Park") before, but "albacore song" has gone from a played-it-once song to a recurring trojan horse of sorts for covers in my live arsenal - if you hear me go into "albacore song" these days, expect to hear Something Else before it's over!
this is the first time i've committed these to writing in one place, but here are the covers i've rolled into "albacore song" so far:
Madonna - Like a Prayer
The Catherine Warwick version of Pollyanna from MOTHER (twice)
M2M - Don't Say You Love Me (gotta repeat this one, it was fun!)
and they likely won't stop there! i've since thanked and gotten to meet piecesofeight in person (after having played a set that, ironically, was my first irl set to not include albacore song in years. oops!). you never know when someone or something will alter your course for the better in unexpected ways!
it turns out even less is for sure
those of you who have been around me for a while have known me to periodically release companion pieces to my full-length albums when there were songs that just barely didn't make it onto those albums (most recently for "florence").
the thing about the "nothing is for sure" sessions, though, is that i had a LOT of material in consideration. way more than any other album i've ever done. coming off of "Don't Worry, You're Great!" i was on fire, writing tons and tons. i've entertained the idea of doing the "nothing is for sure" companion piece before, but it'd be a greater task than usual due to how much viable material was in there to begin with.
but as you may have seen me announce, i'll be releasing an eight-track companion piece consisting of the best of those leftover projects titled "...especially any of this" before the end of the month! more "nothing is for sure" for all! this is the biggest companion piece i've ever released, so i'm excited! and... i've got my next album coming along on top of that! stay tuned!
tell me about it!
i can crunch the numbers for as long as i want, but there's no substitute for real feedback. so if you have something to say to me about "nothing is for sure," fire away! what did you like about it? favorite song(s)? ones you want me to play live more? ones that sucked? hey, the album isn't getting any newer or younger - i wanna know!
all in all, whether you were there for "nothing is for sure" when it came out or you've arrived since, i hope you continue to enjoy what i still consider one of my best albums and proudest achievements. thank you!
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