In 2024, I decided to take a different approach to playing and recording music. After almost 40 years since first hunching over a delicate piece of crafted wood and steel and feebly picking out the melody to a Doors song, I am still learning new things everyday. the Boombox above is inspired by my 1980s childhood of playing my favorite cassette in a portable 2 speaker battery powered musical machine called the Boombox. Explore the buttons above to unlock effects to color the sounds or even record your own new versions of tracks.
The following tracks are the result of not taking the outcome very seriously. Not to suggest that I did not spend time and effort crafting these 12 tunes (and 7 more that did not make the cut). I took the process seriously but always tried to keep moving and not allow any one element to become too precious in my mind or ear. Most of the sounds are the first tones that I arrived at while writing the bass, keyboard and guitar parts. All of the musical ideas are the product of improvisation. I would often play the same looped track for a while, capturing maybe 3 or 4 takes and then I would sample the inspired parts and further evolve them into new sounds and parts.
The mixes that are loaded into the player above are highly compressed mono mixes. I was always impressed that my favorite Portishead album was mixed in mono. So this boombox project gave me the first chance to really listen to my own mixes in mono. I have to say that they tend to have improved (especially in the low end). this is likely due to the lo-fi genre lending itself to gritty and imperfect sounds. If you want to hear the original high quality tracks you can download below.
The liner notes for each track below were produced by a text generating AI after sampling each mix and being prompted to find musical influences in the sounds. I think it is interesting in most of the references that it picked out but these types of models are not very sophisticated yet... Can you find other influences that it missed? Skank Reggae perhaps?