ever made a tune so BANGIN' (or otherwise iconic) that u remember the exact time and place u made it? you listen back to one of ur old songs and it makes u remember how the air tasted???

TELL THEIR TALES HERE...

_{(i'll go first: one evening, i had a warm dinner at an LA restaurant with an old friend from a church that i used to go to. she told me something like, "we haven't seen each other in ages, and it's around your birthday anyways! my treat!" and we ate knifed noodle soup (idk i just translated it literally). when i came back, i was full as hell but satisfied. i sat down at the little desk and saw an ohb about to start. thus, world of yonder was born from the satisfaction of that lovely night, along with the bitpack image's inspiration ofc!)}

https://battleofthebits.com/arena/Entry/hokonikai.mp3/60815/

It was 8th July 23; I was going out with my family, having fun.
Once I got home, I opened my laptop and then surfed up teh bee oh tee bee. Saw OPM's allgear ohb running at 9pm in my timezone. I made the song as usual with samples I have.
I look up the edit history on MPT; there's only 39 minutes of editing. That means I only made the song for 39 minutes.

The song is not really iconic. But it's fun how you can do ohb after doing a fun occasion. (+ didn't know that ohb runs once I got home)

This one was so cool to make
I went to my friend to let him try a cool game I had on my laptop. Then when I saw the battle on botb, I had the marvelous idea of connecting my laptop to their sound system and making it on there.
It was pretty fuckin cool, I felt like a proper musician

oooh fun thread mioh :D

i got two of 'em i'd like to share. the first being taking it personal. at the time i'd just gotten my gameboy + lsdj setup and had started making tunes. i had mentioned it to one of my friends, who proceeded to tell me "that's kinda dumb, why would you write music on a gameboy, there's not even a keyboard or anything". well, that wasn't very cool, echoing michael jordan, "..and i took that personally", creating my first-ever full lsdj track, which i still think sounds okay (though much more primitive compared to my recent songs).

another one is interstellar speedway. i had been cleaning up in the basement and found our copy of mario kart wii stashed inside a cd holder. we hadn't been able to find the game for a few years and i'd missed playing it, so i popped it into our wii and jumped straight back in. i hadn't really realized how much i loved that game, but the nostalgia hit me like, well, a blue shell. mario kart wii was one of the first games i'd ever played (showing my age a bit here) and it holds a special place in my heart. i decided to pair that up with the first tracker software i'd ever used in the form of famitracker to create a song which is like a double-nostalgia sandwich kind of thing.

At the time I wrote Infinite Patterns for tinymod I was in a really introspective mood and just thinking a lot. As soon as I sat down to write something and played the snare (?) sample at a low range, it immediately conjured a visual of an Astronaut breathing in a helmet, and the song wrote itself quite quickly, and -- I think -- said exactly what I wanted it to say. In my opinion, this resulted in what is probably the best entry I have made for botb. Maybe there's a lesson for me to learn here about how I can better tap into my own creativity.

During that battle, I had an idea that I wanted to visually tie [most] of my entries together by following around a beam of light and describing the scenes it was illuminating: a broken radio transmitting from somewhere, an astronaut repairing a space station, crickets looking up from their home as the station flies overhead, a sleeping animal awaking in a cave to early morning chirping, and a disintegrating castle ruin symbolic of broken technology (to bring it full circle). Later on, I also continued this general idea with Adrift in which we follow a snowflake on its way to the ground, which is probably another one of the best things I have made for this site.

These songs and all the ones that made it into Duality

(named for the dual wave/particle nature of light) are all simple, but were meaningful to me because of the place I was at when I wrote them and how it felt like I was able to reach something slightly different that I hadn't quite tapped into yet.

I'm not sure how, but I remember the stories for all my songs. I think of a song, and I remember the exact day with my current mood and motive at the time. I love sharing them, but I have way too many to share haha

weirdly enough I can remember where I made most or all of em too. Not many would I say have a "story" per se but the mental impressions are nice. I was working on "Lysergic Acid Diethylamide Junglist" while flying out of NYC for the final time (moving) so I was tracking on the sidewalk, in the cab, in Newark Intl' etc. I guess LSDJers probably have a better variety of locations-tracked-in than the norm

For Bird Divers, I wanted to experiment with writing motifs representing the mental image of a motion. Since it was for summer chip, I settled for the mental image of a happy African penguin on a beach running towards the water to dive in it. It was partially inspired by an unfinished sketch I had for the battle art that I was too lazy to finish. It was sort of way to release the image into the world without finishing the artwork.

I don't remember iterating much on the core motif. I felt the one I landed on illustrated the little steps and the jump very well, and I automatically felt inspired to write responses to it and to explore it some more. It was a bit magical how everything fell into place.

Once I had most of the song written, I could not stop listening to the whole thing looping. At some point I got off my chair, and started dancing for an embarrassing amount of time... 😅. When I think of this song this is what I see, me dancing and being unable to stop. Every loop restart begging for me to listen to it again.

This was not the end, a lot of the tedious work for arranging and extending the song took a good amount of time after that, but I don't remember much of that. I guess it means it all went well!

for most of my music (& other entries), listening to it just reminds me of where i physically was when i wrote it. this is especially true for one-hour battles, which i'm guessing is because when i'm doing one-hour battles my brain is 100% focused on execution and there is zero space left for reflection or contemplation that i could form distinct memories about. actually a lot of the time when i make music at the computer i stop being aware of my body or Self very much and it's only when i stop that i might realize how cold/hungry/whatever i am... the exception is the 2012-2013 songs which don't conjure a place for some reason. some songs also make me feel whatever i was feeling or thinking about when i wrote it, like:

- i wrote divesting while mad about politics
- pillowhead is about drifting in and out of sleep and listening to it makes me feel like i am

Most of my stuff is composed in a chaotic haze, but I distinctly remember borrowing a conference room at ye dayjob work office to write moosecake over a lunch break, purely on a whim.

Why is that track notable? 'cause it's my very first OHB -- I went from "oh this sounds impossible" to "wait what the fuck this is fun," and I was hooked. :P -- Best lunch break ever.

So... yeah. Whenever someone asks "what's your favorite food" I have to stop myself from saying "moosecake" because nobody gets the reference and I'm insane enough already. :P