Rotten Fruit from the Orchard and Other Abominations

This is the first music I posted to the internet. It contains a 5 track concept album and a 4 track “B-Sides”. The album has a release date of May 14th, 2014 on Bandcamp, although it was posted without the “B-Sides” before then, but that date is lost.

       I had been experimenting with various forms of music-making for the previous year, but never really enjoyed what I had created. I had heard of FL Studio somehow, and downloaded it’s free demo of whatever version was current at the moment. I wasn’t a big fan of FL’s interface. So many buttons. Yet, I managed to make my first song of this era, “Rotten Skin of the Last Fruit”. The tracks “Three Rotten Fruit” and “The Orchard Falls into Chaos” soon followed, also produced in the FL Studio demo. The FL Studio demo did not allow one to open their projects up again after saving, so these tracks were made in a single session each.

      The first two tracks of the album, “Frosted Orchard” and “Unprotected Dreams from the Orchard”, were created using Audacity. I believe I first heard of Audacity from a “How to Make Video Games”-type book that contained a DVD of various programs. These two songs form a 20+ minute audio collage, featuring Robert Frost reading his poem After Apple-Picking that I got from a CD of spoken word provided by my High School. The collage further samples Inception (2010, Christopher Nolan) and Nine Inch Nail’s 4 Ghosts I. These three major samples set the story of the album. Roughly, the album is about Applejack from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic having a nightmare that Discord (also from MLP:FiM) is destroying her apple orchard. She then wakes to find that her dream came true.

      The concept album is followed by four “B-Sides”: A free-form synth jam, A mashup of The Quick Brown Fox’s Autumn Day Distraction and Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’ Can’t Hold Us, and two harsh noise tracks.

      I had no idea what I was doing when I began this project. Listening to this album again today, it still holds up, in a weird, outsider art kind of way. My first album contains a lot of elements I continue to use to this day: storytelling, sampling pop culture, dark ambient and noise elements, and nebulous references to My Little Pony.

Go Back