Dire Times

By Earp Lug on March 21, 2026 7:35 pm

It feels like every week things in the world look just a little bit worse. That being said, I've been truly blessed to have lots of cool art opportunities to keep me busy, but that also eats into my weekly song-making time. I shot a feature film/visual album on Sunday during the Oscars, starred in an experimental music TV show called inept.social on Wednesday, edited a short film with my buddy last night, and I'm still wrapping out the feature that I production designed/associate produced. All my music-making equipment was disassembled for the show on Wednesday, so I thought I'd make a really simple beat using my volca drum synthesizer.
The beat is really weird, and has three different loops that I can switch between to make a full song, but it felt extraordinarily silly.
When I made the beat, I added in a kick from my TR-8 on a secondary track, so I cranked it up in the edit to be a really pounding sound.
I then recorded about two minutes of me slowly adding to a drone on the Stylophone CPM-DS2, that then ran through an overdrive pedal. I took that recording and ran it through a reverb pedal, slowly cranking up the reverb until the ending, and ran that through the sidechain compressor on my TR-8 at the same BPM as the first beat of the song.
In the edit, I slowly faded between the silly beat and the intense sidechain-compressed drone while keeping the kicks thumping as hard as possible, and that was the song.

For the video, I asked my buddy Trevor to drive behind me while I sprinted down the street at sunset. The first two takes were okay but I wanted them to be in HD instead of SD, so we adjusted the settings of his Sony Handycam HDR-260v and did one final take. I was so dead beat that I couldn't run too well, but I felt the take got the impression of the music I was trying to create, so we threw it on the timeline and animated the key frames to rotate the camera 360 degrees. We then took the color curves and increased the contrast to an extreme degree, and then faded to it from a lightly color-corrected version of the video to create that weird color effect.
We then made three copies of the video, set their opacities to Darken, and used the rate stretch function to make each about two frames shorter than the last. We made everything line up at the end when the color get all crazy, but it makes the beginning of the video look all distorted and glitchy.
Finally we ended the video with a zoom I took on the Handycam down the street that I was running down, messed with the curves again, sped the video up, rotated it 180 degrees, offset a second version of the clip by a couple frames and also set the opacity to Darken, and ended the video on a white frame that fades out.