by Anonymous
Do it yourself. Championed hard and fast by craftspeople the continents over as the mode—nay, lifestyle—for those who get things done. It is the last heuristic, the rule of all thumbs. It’s the stuff of civilizations. And it applies to everything of course, not just water heaters and alternators. Do it yourself recreation; do it yourself career; just do it, man—yourself. Do it for yourself. Most things that we haven’t fixed we’ve at least tried to fix. And it’s a valuable ambition, though most of us who really do do it ourselves have perhaps noticed that while fixing things is rewarding, breaking them is always better. And we broke much of what we could get away with. We were the young and curious minds pulling apart toys, modifying files, playing with dials and switches; getting it, and getting into it. We learned how to customize our world. We grew up editing our levels around us. We became the expert knob twiddlers, the trouble-maker/problem-solvers, the reinventors of the wheel. Most of us that grew up might have done so by accident, having preserved a healthy curiosity, maybe finding ways to get paid to hack something, somewhere, in some professional capacity.
I used to think I had weird heroes. Growing up my heroes were the ones I wanted to be like: Danny Elfman, Teddy Riley, Koji Kondo. My father was my ultimate hero. He raised me among C64s and VIC-20s and 386s. I grew up to be the kid he never got to be, and I inherited a world largely forged by men of his ilk, the digital age. (Of course I never had access to an orchestra) I remember being thirteen and securing a pirated copy of ACID and playing something I’d made for my father, mostly samples of Samuel L. Jackson saying fuck a lot to a back beat. He wasn’t even mad.
I remember combining the famitracker with vocaloid thinking I was really somebody. I remember amassing over a hundred original songs on my Youtube channel, and imagining one day I would be writing scores for feature films.
Chiptune was especially dear to me. And it still is. As with most technologies, it has become more accessible after its obsolescence through its emulation by new technologies (chiptuners may seldom concern themselves with actual chips anymore), and as with most techniques it has been refined and innovated. I have fallen into and out of several obsessions with the style. Habits this old die pretty hard. The most valuable thing for me about chiptune however was not its beloved aesthetic, though that will die hard as well. My favorite thing about composing in this style was that it really felt like composing. Like my heroes. Chiptune for all intent and purpose taught me to compose, or at least helped me learn. I never had an orchestra, but I could do it myself.
Anonymous sat down with composer, engineer, and chiptune legend Disasterpeace to talk 2021.
Anonymous:
How are you? These have been some heavy times, how is your 2021 so far?
Disasterpeace:
From a personal standpoint it’s been pretty good actually. 2020 was a very difficult year of dramatic renewal for me and lots of things changed … The last few years were rough overall between personal relationship changes, loss of loved ones and extremely challenging projects. I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on things and I feel like I’m probably in the best place I’ve been since 2015 or 16. Just trying to focus on things that really matter these days.
Anonymous:
How is your daily livelihood? Are you staying busy or have you taken a break?
Disasterpeace:
I’ve been busy – still have a full plate of game and film work but I’ve been working my way out of that grind and trying to orient myself more towards personal projects. Lately I’ve been doing lots of tool building and various things with software.
Anonymous:
Can you tell me anything about the project for theatre you were working on?
Disasterpeace:
Not yet, but hopefully soon I’ll be able to talk about it. Everything is still pretty up in the air because of the pandemic.
Anonymous:
You’ve made and used systems for creating procedurally generated sounds in your work before. What role do you think algorithms, or even artificial intelligence, will play in popular music during the 21st Century?
Disasterpeace:
I think we’ll see algorithms continue to get better at making bad music. But on the fringes I expect things will continue to develop in interesting ways. It seems like a lot of the audio research these days is oriented towards speech and music recognition. That stuff is fine and dandy but I’m looking forward to seeing more experiments in DSP and musical structures for more more creative, less utilitarian applications. I love seeing people abuse tools for unintended artistic purposes.
Anonymous:
Have you ever bought a new piano? Like, new new. If so, what did you get?
Disasterpeace:
Nope. I bought a 70s upright about 9 years ago though. A Yamaha U1. I don’t intend to ever sell it. I might get it outfitted for MIDI playback though.
Anonymous:
Are you sitting on a huge mountain of unreleased juvenilia? On the contrary, how much of your old music have you lost
Disasterpeace:
I’ve released most of my juvenilia. There’s an album called History of the Vreeland that pretty much captures my early years of music. Other releases that cover that period include The Chronicles of Jammage the Jam Mage, Atebite and The Warring Nations, Cereal Code, and Daniel Matthew & Richard. But I do have tons of unused material from the various soundtracks I’ve worked on over the years that haven’t seen the light of day. I’m definitely planning to release most of it in chunks when the time and form factor are right. I’m always experimenting with album form factor to try to find music that sits well together. I have an ongoing series of ‘B-Sides’ records, and there are definitely a few more coming in that light.
Anonymous:
Of all your projects, do you have a favorite?
Disasterpeace:
This is pretty hard to answer. They’re all so different – I’ve had a lot of fun with some of my personal projects, like January. Taking those skills into the commercial space with Mini Metro was also a ton of fun. And I got to go to New Zealand and hike Mt. Doom, so that was a plus. FEZ was one of the easiest projects I ever worked on. Hyper Light Drifter and Under the Silver Lake were brutally difficult. But they’re all my babies. And yet I think I’ve learned to let go of most of them in a way. Once they’re out there they don’t really belong to me anymore.
Rich Vreeland has composed scores for films such as It Follows, Under the Silver Lake, and for videogames FEZ, Hyper Light Drifter, Mini Metro and many more. Visit: Disasterpeace.com
Anonymous:
What are your career goals, great and small?
Disasterpeace:
At this point, as a composer/producer I’ve pretty much accomplished everything I’ve wanted to accomplish. So I’ve been dabbling in other things, for instance I’ve been doing a ton of technical sound design and audio systems work on Solar Ash. And I’ve had my eyes on other horizons. I still have a lot of unfinished material I need to release. Some of it is music. Some of it is software and tools. The last couple of years I’ve kind of realized that I’m getting very close to ‘Last Dance’ territory, and there’s so much I can offer outside of just writing scores. So I plan to do more of that and spend less time being filtered by other people.