Octamidi Megawave by Buttress O'Kneel

NOTES FROM THE ARTISTE:

heaps of the tracks on this album feature the Midifier, the Octaverter, or both. these are tools available online. so the album title "octamidi megawave" refers to these two tools, plus the fact that the previous proper compop release was "bastardwave". the album after my "bastard pop" album was "megabastard", and i was thinking i'd just go through my compop titles but adding or replacing "wave" at the end, so the album after "bastardwave" kinda has to be "megawave".

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

THE ART:
the basis is the Radiohead Hail to the Thief cover. but two of the tracks on the album are called "underpants" (one normal and one randomised), so i googled "underpants" and this guy wearing these little lacy undies made me laugh, so i used them too. also, the piece Fur Elise recurs in several forms across the album, so i stuck Beethoven's head in the mix - which was perfect because the dude wearing the undies had no head. Destiny's Child also appear on the album, so i stuck them on it too. then i stuck the whole image into an online Deep Dream neural net thing, and deepdreamed it in the style of the original Radiohead cover - so you'll notice that all the things that originally are words on the Radiohead album are now just robot-world gibberish. yay artificial intelligence! i took the deepdreamed image and blended it back into the pre-dreamed image, tweaked, etc. done!

THE TRACKS:

Die To Time No:
it's literally just the Billie Eilish song shoved into the Octaverter - all i did was press "go". it was so beautiful i didn't want to touch it afterwards, so i didn't do anything to it. you can make this exact same piece yourself by downloading the Octaverter and pressing "go". so it's proper communal folk music!

Lovely Guy:
mostly Bad Guy cut with Billie Eilish talking about how music is a culturally shared thing, which i'm completely taking to mean "please sample my music as much as you want Buttress, i love your work, yr doing great things". also the string bit from her song "Lovely". the cut up rap voices are mostly Old Dirty Bastard, but there are also fragments of Pharrell and Gwen i think from the You Got It Like That song.

Furry Lease Midified:
it's just Fur Elise shoved through the same midifier i used for DadaMidiPop - it converts things to shitty midi-powered piano, so everything ends up wonky and drunk. nice. again, complete folk music - you can do this yourself in literally a minute or two. maybe three.

Chocolate Android:
not sure why i did this, but it's my song from Shitcore "Paraplegic Android (Part 1)", but this time smooshed with the Bad Lip Reading piece "Chocolate Lagoon". can't remember what motivated this at all - it's been sitting on my computer for some time now. soz.

Bad Dreams:
yeah, it's Bad Guy again, sorry. when songs are super popular i can sometimes get obsessed with different approaches to dismantling their magic spells and deconstructing their hypnosis. somehow along the way a Sweet Dreams acapella found its way in there, and then it was called Bad Dreams - which then i think led to Kylie getting smooshed into there as well - can't get bad dreams out of your head? i actually really dig this one although it's kinda like a laid back minimalist house groove or something rather than the epileptic breakcore i'm more known for. meh, i like it anyway.

Epic of the Cherubim:
i found a cool little vocoding tool, so i started vocoding random stuff together. two of these random things are Faith No More's Epic, vocoded with the Hymn of the Cherubim by Tchaikovsky - so the notes come from the Hymn and the shape of the words come from Epic. it really is a completely random pairing, so, yeah, no real story behind it or point or whatever - just sounded really cool so i kept it. then i took this finished thing and rammed it through an audiomulch setup - the same setup i used for the Make It Up Club set i did earlier this year with that Lizzo song, it's somehere on my bandcamps, you can listen to it later if you want. so yeah, basically a random experiment shoved through an improvised breakcore process - no rhyme or reason, just rad sickness and wicked phat.

Furry Lease Octaverted:
same bit of Fur Elise, but this time instead of whacking it through the Midifier i whacked it through the Octaverter, which is complicated to understand but easy to use - i pressed "go" basically. again, total folk music - we can all make this exact same piece by pressing a coupla buttons. culture to the people!

Still Inside:
i was listening to some Nine Inch Nails and i heard Trent say "and i am still inside you", and it reminded me of the Bjork song where she sings "he's still inside me", and so i had to see if the two lines could be forced to work together. turns out, they sorta almost can be. who knew?

Underpants:
yeah, i know Childish Gambino isn't really saying "underpants" in the song, but fuck it, it made me giggle. i heard the new Billie Eilish song and the bit where she's all like "articles articles articles" and "interviews interviews interviews" made me think of "underpants underpants underpants" from that Gambino song. so i knew they had to come together somehow. another thing completely unrelated was i discovered an online tool called Beatmachine which can automatically rearrange music in a beat-related way, so it can randomise or delete every second beat or swap beats and so on, so i shoved the fast-rapping song Worldwide Choppers into the Beatmachine and made it swap beats 2 and 4. then i used that result as the kinda verses sections for this completely unrelated underpants track. but i think it works? who's to say? oh yeah, and also i used Getyarn dot IO to find samples of people saying things "contraband", "interviews", "articles", and "underpants", and incorporated them into the final song.

Break Up With Your Soldier:
one of the first ever pieces i Octaverted was Break Up With Your Girlfriend by Ariana Grande, and it ruled. but for some reason i've always wanted that song to go into Soldier by Destiny's Child. i've been planning to see if they can fit together since i heard the Ariana song, but never done it - so when i Octaverted Ariana this time, i decided to also Octavert Soldier and smoosh those pieces together instead of the originals. so i did. i think i also used a little Venetian Snares drumming to hold it all together, but not much. maybe one day i'll return to this idea. i just don't know what the future holds.

Vocode Yourself:
so when i was in this blurt of wanting to vocode everything with everything else, i had this crazy idea: vocode the instrumental of something with its own acapella. so i tried it with Eminem's Lose Yourself, which i had both parts for. so the notes part is the instrumental, and the shape of the words is the vocal stem, and i think it kicks complete arse. i think this is a sick idea which i will definitely revist with other songs, if i can find their instrumentals and acapella stems. really interesting way of remixing something!

Eleanor's Headlights (Lovely):
another track from Shitcore, "Eleanor's Headlights (Sink Beneath the Sun)", but reworked and remixed to now incorporate that violiny tune from Billie Eilish's song Lovely. didn't need to happen, but i like it.

Furry Lease Octaverted then Midified:
it's track seven shoved into the Midifier, so the weirdness of Octaverting is tempered a bit by being played by more trad piano-sounding noises. it sounds less like a prepared piano now and more like someone just playing a fucked up version of Fur Elise while completely off their face.

I Will Spin Plates:
i heard that the Radiohead song "Spinning Plates" (which is one of my absolute favourite Radiohead songs) is the same as their song "I Will" but backwards. so of course i had to force them together to see. it works very nicely.

I Will Break Plates:
then i shoved that conjoined song into an Audiomulch setup - breakcore ensues.

Vocode Yourself in the Jazz Club:
so i took the track Vocode Yourself and shoved that through the Midifier. the result was this abstract kinda free-jazz piano version, so i augmented the jazzness with extra jazz percussions (some of which are stolen from a Sonny Sharrock album i think) and a walking bassline that i found on Youtube.

Lovely Guy Remulched:
i think i stuck Lovely Guy into an Audiomulch setup and then cut the bits out that i really liked and looped them. can't honestly remember actually. oh well.

Furry Lease Octaverted then Midified then Reoctaverted:
it's just track 13 run through the Octaverter again, turning the realish piano version of unrealish tones back into something like someone actually attempting to play the real piece on a prepared piano. i dunno.

Random Underpants:
this is the Underpants track shoved into the Beatmachine. the Beatmachine has a setting where it just totally randomises the order of every beat - this is it doing that to the Underpants song, but i stopped it after about halfway because who wants to listen to 4 and a half minutes of random bullshit? and then i ended it with one of the original "underpants" samples that i found on Getyarn.

Epic of the Cherubim (Midified and Remulched):
i stuck my original Epic of the Cherubim track into the Midifier, which of course turned it into a drunk piano freakout, which i thought would sound awesome reintegrated back into the track again. so i did that, and it sounded sweet, but i thought maybe it was too long a track to just keep it the same all the way through, so i took the section where the breakbeat glitchwave begins, and re-glitched that in a new Audiomulch setup. so it's the same as the first version (except added Midified piano layer) until that point, and then it's a whole new improvised breakcore masterpiece from then on.

Over Party's the When:
just When The Party's Over run through the Octaverter. plain, simple, and sounds amazing. i barely touched it.

AND THAT'S ALL I HAVE TO SAY ABOUT THIS ALBUM THANK YOU GOOD NIGHT.

oh, except these are links to the tools! go forth and culturefy!

OCTAVERTER:
http://octaverter.com/octaverter-installer-20170614.zip

MIDIFIER:
https://www.ofoct.com/audio-converter/convert-wav-or-mp3-ogg-aac-wma-to-midi.html

BEATMACHINE:
beatmachine.branchpanic.me/

b🍩k

“Words like "mashup" and "remix" don't really do justice to Buttress O'Kneel's method - Top 40 pop crap gets sliced, diced, and tossed into a dizzying, exciting hardcore electro stew. Compared to other djs who timidly drop a Vanilla Ice acapella over a Chemical Bros intro just to move a dance floor, O'Kneel shreds copyrights with a blood-curdling vehemence. Smash the state!”
- Music 4 Maniacs