Blingley-to-date (2022)

This post serves mostly to showcase and document my work under my electronic music alias Blingley, and the four albums I’ve released to-date, starting from the first one in 2013.

The first album, above, was quite simply named and contained a rather varied styles of music – it was overall rather experimental, albeit grounded in solid rhythmic foundation, and that trend has largely continued. 2013 was largely the heyday of the Dubstep craze, which any observant listener will probably detect.

Imperfections was my second album, and already much more ambitious and coherent. The tracks actually fit together, and there’s an understandable structure. My personal affinity for the rougher timbral characteristics of more distorted sounds really shows through. Overall, I’m still very proud of the album, and feel like it has stood up to time well.

Here the JAWM 2019 stands for January Album Writing Month 2019 – a yearly challenge in which musical artists attempt to write, record, produce, mix, master, and finish an entire album within a single month. Mine was more of an EP length, rather than a LP – I’d still consider it a success. The defining musical characteristic is likely the blending of some orchestral instruments into an otherwise electronic blend with some definitive experimental IDM-characteristics. Perhaps not to everyone’s taste. The album was also seamlessly written, so that tracks naturally flow into each other – a trait that the bandcamp player refuses to reproduce seamlessly.

Post-Digital Apocalypse is something written in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, in the social isolation that followed it. The album description on Bandcamp reads “One man’s self-documentation of social isolation and the resulting slow descent into pseudosanity.”, and is a pretty apt descriptor. The album contains disjointed and frankly bizarre tracks of very verying descriptions and lengths, and some of them can be sonically very harsh and grating.

In addition, the Sheepwith OST was written under my electronic music alias – though it’s stylistically very different, and was much more of a commercial venture.

RobberDock Games – Sheepwith OST

Sheepwith by Iiro Lindell / RobberDock Games is an arcade-style flying game where you rescue sheep from wolves and other hazards. I had the pleasure of writing music and doing some plane sound design for the project.

It was the first of my larger projects, and one of Iiro’s as well – and as such a fair amount of time was spent learning to communicate with each other – with people of different skillsets and interests. In the end we opted for the bright, upbeat, kind-of-funky style of music that you can hear above. In retrospect the mixing is perhaps a bit too bright, but overall we were (and at least I still am) happy with the general results: the songs are quite catchy, they all fit the theme of the levels, and definitely the overall aesthetic of the game.

The game is available to play on Iiro’s itch.io page (https://iirolindell.itch.io/sheepwith) and on coolmathgames.com.