Unfinished Tracks

When everything ends up failing, it's time to hit that Restart button. A desperate scream into the void, as the high-pitched sustained note towards the end tries to express.
I was going for a "Tomorrow Never Knows" kind of vibe with that overly compressed drum part and its continuous cymbals. Turned out much more uncanny than the original, sadly.

One of the regulars on the FL Studio Discord server nicknamed Ajdj100 came up with that guitar riff and said "so I wanna hear people flip this sample in the next hour"… Turns out it got me hooked for about 7 hours straight and this is the result.
The bass part was recorded live, as well as the keyboard parts (using a MIDI keyboard though).

This one was started during a voice chat session on the FL Studio Discord server. Most people were making trap beats, so I figured I could attempt to do that too, but with a twist. I ended up mixing together a bunch of completely different genres—trap (but pretty bad), rock (…ish), psytrance, chiptune. Crazy hand-sliced guitar chops in there too.

Typically my reaction after hibernating for a couple months. I had basically stopped producing at that point. This is one of those now rare moments where I actually get something done. It contains a sample from some new age CD, some African beat I recorded off the radio on cassette back when I was like 5, chopped and tweaked guitar samples (Apple Loops), and a sample from a mod file called "Stereotypia" by Dizzy.

Based on one of the stock presets in FLEX, one of Image-Line's latest plugins.

I was making a chord progression and noticed that the 5th one was the same as the 1st one, a whole step higher. Next thing that popped in my mind: "what if I repeated the same 4 chords one step higher every time until i'm back in the same key one octave higher?" Then I thought of a way to wrap it within one octave so that it loops seamlessly while still going up, sort of. The piano line at the end also continually goes up, Shepard-tone-style, in a similar fashion as the endless stairs soundtrack in Super Mario 64.

A complete sabotage of György Ligeti's Piano Etude #10 "Der Zauberlehrling", revisited in a much more tonal form and in a hitech psytrance aesthetic, with trippy pads with automated psychedelic delay.

"Smooth dreams" (with the vowels swapped) would be the name of the patch I used in the intro or something.

… at darker and more experimental hitech.

One of my early attempts at producing hitech psytrance, which was the genre I was listening to during that period of time.

The title reflects all the existential questioning I had at that time. Why is everything like it is? Why are there terrible, unfathomably atrocious things happening in this world, and why in the meantime other people live such a lucky life? Among plethora of other questions. I wrote this one a couple days after a friend of mine told me about his then-girlfriend who had Dissociative Identity Disorder, and I became unhealthily obsessed with it.
It's an experiment with the Array Mbira library by Soniccouture, with 7/4 time signature. I like the synth sequence in 16ths towards the end.

This one stems from an open public collaborative project in an early FL Studio Discord server I just had joined. It has RhynoMatt's Rapiddacius theme (playing at the beginning) and Jay Ikalima's General MIDI drums and melody. The structure and a good bit of the production are by me. The project stopped after the next iteration, when someone used paid third-party plugins and no one bothered to go on from there.

Quite possibly one of my stupidest tracks ever. It started with me typing gibberish in the Acapela online text-to-speech demo. The speech samples are just the sequence "~roitr" ([ʀwatʀ]) preceded by every consonant phoneme in French (without the phonetic duplicates).

I was just back from vacation or a trip to the beach or something. This track is a pretty groovy mix of various samples from here and there, including vocal chops in broken English recorded by a drummer friend of mine, an excerpt from a song I referenced in the description of "Deafening" (2015-12-10), and other heavily edited samples…

I won't say much about the events that happened a couple weeks prior, which led me to write this one. I've given up all hope of getting over what happened. Still to this day. One week in absolute heaven and back. Back to square one, where you get reminded that all your dreams are broken and you're completely messed up. No wonder this track is pretty influenced by industrial rock a-la NIN…

Written just a day after Somewhere Else, this track has a completely different mood. It uses a bunch of pads I made using a couple samples from the tracks I listed below, running them through PaulStretch with various settings.

One of my favorite WIPs. It is the collision of two projects of mine, one with self-vocoded vocal chops (I removed the vocoder) and another with the rhythm section & chord progression.
Quite possibly the best hocket I ever produced. It's actually one of the projects that served as a basis for my Sytrus-only demo project "Overcome".

This track uses a 15/8 pattern as a bass line that my brother and I discovered in an interesting way. We were rehearsing at home and he had his electronic drum kit plugged into my computer, but controlling a piano track instead. He was playing this 5-to-3 paradiddle and it made that nice interlaced pattern. A couple years later I reused it in this project, with thick layered synths and randomized note durations.
The first half is in 4/4 (the sequence gets out of sync with the 4-bar cycles), the second half is in 15/4 (the chord stabs are placed differently and accordingly).

Yet another one of those uninspired tracks where I would open FL Studio, mess around with stuff, save and call it a day, and be like "that's not much, but hey, at least I did something today".

This is the version without the "loudness war" mastering. The chiptune synths and punchy drums still make it quite "in your face". The chord progression is recycled from some song I used to play with a band I had joined at some point (we split shortly after).

Back to the underground techno era from the mid-90s. I used quite a lot of CC0 and CC-BY samples from Freesound, most of them from user Mikobuntu. The title is a portmanteau of their nickname and "tube", because of the comb-filtered sample of theirs at the beginning, which sounds like a synthetic PVC pipe to me…

I somehow found myself messing with the vocal stems of one of the demo projects in FL Studio. I used a couple free third-party plugins in this one as well. The vocal harmonizing is made with KeroVee, and the sequenced bass synth in the beginning is Kamioooka, a virtual modular synth (both are free plugins). This track would also likely be the one that hits the most copyright flags, since I used samples from quite a lot of sources (listed below).

Like a farewell letter, the supposedly last track from someone who has grown frustrated and tired of music in general and seriously considers retiring… and doesn't. I like to believe this is my WIP that has the widest dynamic range. A reaction to the loudness war. As illustrated by the tiny tiny arpeggio in the background playing against a super hard-hit snare drum. And barely any compression at all.

It's actually the name of a DAW. I tried the demo for a couple minutes, ended up with this track, exported the stems to work on it some more in FL Studio.

The capitalization is intentional. It's because I used a sample from "Icarus" by Madeon, backwards. And recreated the synth sound and line from the end of "Shuriken", also by Madeon. The drums and bass line are from Ultrafunk… once again.

Just messing around with a super wide arpeggio. Most of the elements I added on top of it are heavily influenced by the Spyro 1 OST (the e-piano sixths are even literally from "Dark Hollow").

Yet another… track I couldn't find a proper name for, apparently.

The second half of the "Apokalipse" track I initially made in NitroTracker.

It's actually a newer WIP version of a pretty old track of mine, that I initally made in this old MIDI score editor called Midisoft Recording Session, probably around 2004. The piano part used to be a blatant plagiarism of RHCP's Californication, but I changed it a bit to make it less obvious. But the other instruments are the result of a happy accident, where at some point I improperly removed a channel and all the MIDI instruments ended up shifted by one. This new version obviously uses the Ultrafunk beat, which I was so fond of at the time.

The intro is mostly soundfonts. I really like it. It kind of gives me a Minecraft feel, for some reason. Hence the title. The second part is just me ruining it with the house beat from Ultrafunk.

This title is also a super approximate phonetic transcription of "rock'n'roll!" (see "Gronnen-Gron"). This one also features "THE Drumpad snare", layered with a clap. It also uses sampled guitars from the Sonic Rush (Nintendo DS) soundtrack.

One of my absolute favorites, even to this day. It started with me messing around with random slices of a speech sample from a parody tutorial video on YouTube (by some guy with a hilarious Swedish accent), ran through an autotuner and a vocoder. But the magic really started happening when I added the drums and super funky bass line. Which actually served as a basis for soooo many of the tracks that would follow. And it's probably one of my absolute favorite WIPs. I think this marked the beginning of my French House phase.

When life gives you lemons, you make acid trance.

There's quite a backstory behind this one. That night I was at my lowest again, and super frustrated with whatever I attempted to make in FL Studio… as usual. So I decided to make a deliberately cheesy and basic song, like with just one note and a very basic beat, that I intended to call "Uninspired". But instead of doing that, I ended up loading a bunch of soundfonts to mess around with, and it eventually turned into this funny videogame music thing. But after an hour and a half of unredoable improvisation and tweaking around, FL decided to crash on me, and I had forgotten to reenable the automatic backups. Ragequitting ensued. That's it, I'm off to bed. Literally threw my poor cat out of my bedroom, furiously took my sweater off… and heard a snap. One half of my glasses was hanging under my neck, the other was on the floor. It got me so pissed and ashamed and depressed that I couldn't even get out of bed for the next whole day. It wasn't until a couple days later (and getting my glasses fixed ^^) that I eventually attempted to remake the project I had lost that night.

Second version of this track (see "Landscape", 2013-01-18), this time with a rhythm section, and a much more complex arrangement.

Indeed, I made this on a Thursday. This usually happens when you get to a point where you take the first thing that comes to your mind as a file name when saving a project.

Another example of emotional hypersensitivity vs. social networks. One of those days when you reply to someone, and then someone else posts exactly the same comments a couple minutes later, gets all the upvotes, and you get ignored. Description is cringey af, I know. The track is pretty empty too.

Stands for Default Sytrus Presets. It's actually a (quite loose) techno remix of some very old FL Studio 4 demo pattern called "Rain Dance", which from what I remember only used Sytrus.

The initial project description of this track was: "A bird trying to solve puzzles? That doesn't make any sense!" (a reference to Toki Tori 2). Still doesn't make much less sense than the pseudo-musicality of those melodies and sequences I obtained using FL Studio's Piano Roll randomizer.

I decided to go with the deep Detroit house vibe for this one. Typically the kind I'd record on cassettes off the radio in the mid 90s when I was like 5.

The second revision of some psytrance pattern I created way back in 2005. Classic Goa before I even know what it was called.

As you can guess from the title, I was in a phase where I was really frustrated with anything I did in FL Studio. The main musical idea for this one is based on a mod file by Purple Motion called minimum.s3m, which you can probably find on The Mod Archive.

The title is as random as the track. Another attempt at manually recreating Gross-Beat-style glitches.

The result of an experiment with the Pianoteq 5 demo. A Bösendorfer piano ran through a Taj-Mahal reverb. This is one of the first tracks of which I was starting to get satisfied with my mixing.

I thought of it like it was something said to me by someone else. Like, something along the lines of "hey… before you leave… before you… um…, (but please reconsider), I just wanted to tell you one last thing".

This track's intro uses a melody from the soundtrack of a homebrew game on the NDS made a while ago by a friend of mine, and it's called "Inside the Machine". The rest is me messing around with that, slapping this retro-house kind of vibe onto it, which doesn't have much to do with the original track.

I think that's the third version of the track. The kick is too aggressive imo.

Believe it or not, the time signature is 4/4. But most of the instruments, especially the drums, try their hardest to confuse the listener. There's also a glitched metronome sound in there.

This is a quite minimalist piece, but it feels very emotional to me. It may sound super cringey, but this was my attempt at describing how beautiful this girl I dreamed up was. Ah, the things you do when you're at an all-time low… Anyway. Odd time signature (5/4), odd tuning (433.7 Hz, ie. 25 cents down). The track stayed in this early minimal state because I couldn't figure out what to do with it that wouldn't ruin it…

This one is a much more obvious sign of my downward spiral. Using this expression on purpose, since it's heavily inspired by NIN. It's also one of those 2-bar ideas I quickly threw in FL as a way to let off steam, and then forgot about it.

The time signature is 7/4. This is one of those tracks (probably along with "The Place…") that I produced literally in my bed, on my laptop. It was not very long after I had this complete mental collapse in late April 2014. I just had finished my studies but had absolutely no idea what to do next, and the rest of my life was a mess. Still kind of is. I was feeling completely lost in life, and I spent most of my time messing around in FL to cope. I suppose the title implies I was starting to feel out of touch…

It started with two samples: the guitars with the messed up dynamic range, and the heavily time-manipulated marimbas from Steve Reich's "Drumming". The title refers to the kind of rythmically-modulated reggae feel given by the speed change every even triplet, and the bass line which uses the same chords as Daft Punk's "Revolution 909".

It's actually a Skyblog, for the French Millenials among us who know what it is. Typically, teenagers' blogs from the mid-'00s, written in textspeak, with lots of cringey stuff from that awkward time of our lives. I was 16 when I dated my (second and) last gf ever. Turns out I probably wasn't a great bf since she left me for some other guy after a mere couple weeks, and only told me about it on her blog when I asked what was going on. Not the greatest way to break up imo but whatever.
Almost a decade later, I decided to go and see if the blog still existed, for some reason; turns out all the articles and comments are still there… Yeah, I know, that's TMI. Anyway, the intro and outro are what I had in mind while nostalgically browsing through the dozens of pages. They're based on some demo song on Yamaha PSR keyboards.

A very experimental and somewhat disturbing track I made from various weird samples found here and there. It starts with a very accelerated bad beatbox sample from some Mozinor parody video, pitched way down, then shower noises and a stretched moaning sample, a time-manipulated sample of a toddler babbling, various pads from the Distorted Reality packs, a short sample ("Bil?") from some skit by Québécois comedian François Pérusse, and a chime sample that plays backwards at a super low speed all the way through.

Here's another one with vocoded beatbox, the one panned left at the beginning is actually Google Beatbox (from the good old days when "pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk pv" still worked). The "quoi?" sample is from some stupid recording of my brother and me, with pitch and formants shifted up. The "1-2-3-4!!" is a sample I found on the SoundBible website.

A 3xOsc-only track.

Super vintage retro house track. The FM "growl" is still way too loud in this version… Also, the virtual analog SimSynth patch in the second halves is a twisted version of the synth in the Who's "Baba o'Riley".

Features pulse wave and thick bitcrushed power chords. Also, needs more cowbell.

"+ ONOTOR" is the name of a fictional one-man electronic project I had imagined as a kid, super inspired by Recoil's early "Hydrology" album. This track hasn't many elements in common though, I don't remember why I named it that. Re-uses elements from Zhong.

The title is a very approximate phonetic transcription of "Rock'n'Roll", the kind a French kid still learning to speak would pronounce. Omg the guitars are so cheap when I think about it… Features a couple Morphine presets, and *the Snare*, which is a preset I tweaked in Drumpad and that I really like.

Totally cliché title for a track with eastern Asian elements, with all the gamelan soundfonts and stuff.

Some chill track. I really should EQ out those super high frequencies in the intro pad. >_< A friend once told me it reminded him of "Last night a DJ saved my life". But it's just a coincidence.

Quite loud. Mostly based on two samples: one from Madeon's "Icarus", and the other (sliced and played backwards and accelerated) from a song I recorded with a short-lived band I used to be in, with my little brother (the "John" in the title is the nickname I used to give him, since this was usually the character name he chose when we played games as kids).

Re-uses the main synth pattern from "Big Sound" and "Phosphorescence", but this time I recreated the Gross Beat pattern manually. I also used a couple samples from Distorted Reality.

Another of those hockets built from disparate elements. The knock is a recreation of the one in Abraham Inc's "Baleboste".

This is also a recreation of a track I initially wrote in an old MIDI score editor called Midisoft Recording Session, somewhere around 2003~2004. As the weird French spelling of the title ("Drunk") implies, I had had a glass of Champagne or something before (I was still underage at that point… yeah I know). The "+3 +2" stereo delay pattern on the main synth somehow attempts to convey that feeling of inner ear instability and dizziness.

Recorded live with a MIDI keyboard. Some parts were completely improvised.

Some chill deep house track. The title probably means it's one of those tracks I made in the middle of the night…

This track re-uses a couple unused ideas that I wrote for some Wii homebrew game back in July 2010. Also features vocoded beatbox. :)

This is merely a transposed version of my "Remember" WIP from a couple years before. For some reason, this new key affects me differently (and a little more) emotionally…

Originally written for someone we once went camping with. The time signature is 15/4.

As the name implies, it's a recreation of some combination in the grid of the Luminaria minigame in Elektroplankton (Nintendo DS).

Super robotic hocket. Mostly contains GMS, Harmor/Harmless and Sytrus.

Experimenting with a couple Harmor stock presets. No drums except from just a kick, because I got super lazy and called it a day.

Basically it's just variations of the main pattern from "Big Sound", with various presets of Gross Beat (real-time time manipulation tool) slapped on it.

Some video game soundtrack attempt, inspired by Rayman 3 and Spyro.

Some simple idea based on my favorite Autogun preset *ever*, for which I've sadly lost the ID (all I remember is that it had between 7 and 9 digits and started with a 5). I'd love to tweak a bunch of things in Ogun (it has too much reverb imo) but that would require me to browse through literally millions of presets until I find it again.
Also the guitars kinda suck since they're just one sample, I need to re-record that with an actual guitar.

The weird pad you're hearing throughout the whole track is actually a super-accelerated excerpt from the late Eduard Khil's Trololo.

One of my early attempts at making hockets. The original track is from a homebrew video game made by a online friend of mine nicknamed Morukutsu, who is a developer and producer (he now also goes by the artist name Puffclouds). At some point during the making of this remix I lost motivation for some reason, and never really bothered to finish it…

Not much to say about this track, except that it served as a basis for a couple others, like "Phosphorescence" and "Trigger".

My first attempt at hocketing. Interestingly enough, Madeon was doing a last-minute replacement gig in my city, and I was a little bummed out that I couldn't go. So I kept myself busy making this instead.

It starts with a recreation of some sample with near-infinite delay that I once heard in some soundscape track… I don't have the reference, but it was used as the background music in an episode of a French mp3 series called Trimoria TV, and the title of the WIP itself is a reference to said passage.

This is the result of me messing around with a couple samples from a huge sample pack someone sent me a while ago.

French listeners might notice a not-so-accidental Jean-Jacques Goldman influence…

I originally wrote that pattern a while earlier in NitroTracker on the Nintendo DS, back when everyone started to panic because of h1n1 and my family started to get into all that conspiracy theory bs. This is the first part of the track, I transcribed the rest in FL Studio a couple years later (see "Apokalipse, cont'd" from 2015-06-19).

The piece starts with random slices of vocoded text-to-speech gibberish.

Loosely inspired by Depeche Mode's "Barrel of a Gun (Underworld Soft Mix)", but with cheesier sound design and chord voicings, and cheap big beat drums on top.

Messing around with a sampled Playskool Silly Songs Jukebox.