Over the years I've written a few tracks for Michael Molinari's 'Soundodger' series of games.

Backtrack : Ford the River

Backtrack is a series devoted to backtracking to tell short stories about songs I've written.

"Ford the River", written for Soundodger 2.

I wrote this song back in 2022 - I think I had just finished playing Alba, which was a really beautiful game, and was inspired to make something that had a laid back, quirky, optimistic island feel. Another island game, Mutazione was also a touchstone for the sound of this, as well as the music of Antonio Carlos Jobim, who is probably my favorite Bossa Nova artist. Doubling whistle and piano for the melody is something that was very much inspired by Jobim who likes to use piano for melodies, but then tends to double it with other instruments in unison, or with effects.

The sound palette features lots of earthy and quirky sounds - sort of a combo of boom bap drums, fretless bass, bossa nova elements like nylon guitar, piano, whistling, guiro, shakers, and then a few quirky things here and there to pad everything out.

"Outta Dodge", written for Soundodger 2.

Behind the scenes of the making of the "Outta Dodge" level, featuring the developer's commentary.

"Daisy Wheel", written for Soundodger.

Backtrack is a series devoted to backtracking to tell short stories about songs I've written.

Back in August 2006, I wrote out a rough 45 seconds or so of ideas in MIDI based around a 7/8 rhythm and tentatively called it "Weird Violence".

A few days later, I started working on another idea; unlike the previous, this one had some legs, and I wound up incorporating the core idea of Weird Violence into one of its sections. By the end it was about five and a half minutes long.

After bringing the song into Reason and cleaning it up, I sensed that it was right up the alley of some of the other music I had been writing at the time; tunes like Jump Error. As a result I decided to include it in my plans for the space concept album that I’d eventually release four years later. The track was called “The Seventh Formation”, a slight nod to the meter of the earliest idea for this song.

The similarities between "The Seventh Formation" and its new counterpart "The New Formation" are heard right away, but as the piece progresses the differences become more apparent. By the end of each track, their relationship to each other is pretty hard to determine. The New Formation only uses a few of the original elements, and takes the material in an entirely new direction.

"The Seventh Formation" is now available as a bonus track on "Deorbit (B-Sides)".