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.

Music for Glimmering Deep Design

Glimmering Deep Design (https://www.glimmeringdeepdesign.com/fi) is a Finnish jewelry manufacturer specializing in handmade alternative jewelry and accessories. They frequently collaborate with bands and photographers looking for some ornaments with more character and attitude.

Their product lineup is organized in various themes, including “Viking” and “Steampunk”. I composed music for these two themes for use in online advertising and rich social media presence campaigns.

Instrumental music was chosen so as to not distract from the content of the advertisements. The musical pieces are fairly long, so that different parts of them can be used in different ads without them sounding too similar.

The ad campaigns ran in summer 2020 and were organized by Mediashake Oy.

RobberDock Games – Robber Wheels (GBJam 2018)

GBJam is an annual game jam where over a week people create games inspired by, or similar to, the games on the Game Boy consoles. In 2018 Iiro Lindell of RobberDock Games and I took part in it, with me creating the music and sound effects and he – well, everything else, really.

Robber Wheels

What I found particularly interesting about the challenge was creating music that fits thematically. For this I chose to use the FamiTracker software – a chiptune tracker that emulates the NES soundchip and allows users to compose music (and SFX) for it. Learning to use it wasn’t exactly trivial, but once I got the hang of it, there was a surprising amount of expressivity to be found.

Famitracker 0CC

Overall the project was fun, and I learned quite a bit about chiptune, and many of the lessons are also applicable in different styles of music. Our submission wasn’t exactly perfectly authentic to Game Boy consoles in particular – NES has one audio channel more (for five total) and I used the NCO expansion chip in Famitracker, bringing my total channel count to 7 – though I chose not to use the DPCM sample channel as it didn’t sound very gameboyish to me.

The game is available on Iiro Lindell’s itch.io page: https://iirolindell.itch.io/robberwheels

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.