A few years back, I found myself in a store for musical instruments. For the most part, they’re fun places to be, since you can bang around on instruments that you don’t own and get a feel for them.

I started playing on a keyboard, making up random patterns, and it was like lightning striking. It felt great, and I seemed to have some intuition on which keys I should bang in a given order. I went home with it that very day, and began to experiment. Every single day, I practiced until I got bored.

Over time, I started to develop the ability to sound out songs that I knew, and I ventured into composing. Although it was a struggle, I found that I could gradually translate ideas about music that lived in my head into actual music that I could listen to. During a long period of unemployment, I began exploring this full-time.

What I came up with for a first project was Butterfly Doom. The project is almost definitely a joke, in the way it pretends to be super serious and grim. Most of the songs were drawn from what I was feeling in 2019 – unease at the Trump Administration, the final death blow of an unhealthy relationship, and the long shadow of a depression that had followed me for years and years. In spite of this source material, or perhaps because of it, the resulting music takes the approach of trying to sound way too serious while also sounding way too outrageous. It’s largely tongue-in-cheek, and virtually every part of the process was a messy experiment.

So, without further ado, here is the result of ten months of work. The resulting sound is vaguely reminiscent of 90’s computing, MS-DOS, and adventure games. At the same time, though, it’s still effectively rock. The sound is slightly edgy, like Nine Inch Nails, but the lyrics are absolutely over the top, and I even get to channel my inner lovechild of Trent Reznor and Glenn Danzig.

All of this music was produced using MIDI and digital instruments (specifically, LMMS and Ardour on a Linux workstation), and the resulting music was released to Open.Audio under a permissive Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution Share-Alike license. If you like it, give me a shout and feel free to use or remix it in any way you see fit!