So, good news -- My personal laptop is still dead, but I managed to get a copy of Ableton and a couple of my plugins up-and-running on another device. Like with my Week 12 submission (done with the CMI PianoHi sample in GarageBand), this week's is a couple hours' doodle session (on some organ preset in Ableton), getting expressive energy out and generating weird tone-cluster resolutions in the process.

"How did you write this, or what is going on in this piece?"
Structurally, from the top-down, this piece is three four-bar sections for a total of twelve bars @ 93BPM (and is looped once). The song was written section-by-section and the order it was written was [Lower voices of Section A] → [Upper melody of Section A] → [Lower voices of Section B] → [Lower voices of Section C] → [Upper melody of Section B] → [Upper melody of section C].

The upper melody in Sections A & B hews closely to the 'D#/Eb Minor' scale (because I was like, "Oh that's cool, Ableton 12 has the option to highlight notes of a particular scale"), with the occasional G-natural as a landing point towards the end of those sections. In practice I was mostly playing it as an F# Major scale. And then the upper melody of Section C was written with harmonic regards to the underlying lower voices as a continuation of the melodic energy up to that point.

To start, the lower voices of Section A were hummed into place (as one voice) and then I overdubbed that with the organ. All the emotional content in this piece is contained in the lower-voice clusters which vary between 3 and 4 voices high. The lower-voice clusters in Section A were written as clusters and not as single notes because I needed the security of additional stimulus, I guess. But for that section, each cluster does "represent" a single tone that has been tempered across three-to-four voices, therefore the lower-voices in this section remain a "melodic" idea written in celebration of a friend's birthday.

As the piece goes on through the lower-voices, I get increasingly agitated by both the stress of making music and of unresolved feelings toward the history and ongoing arc of my friendship with that person. We are on great terms but I'm uncomfortable with happy endings, either due to oppositional neurology of my own, and/or possibly related to family history of a parent who "chose" special occasions to blow up. At this stage of partwriting, my process and "goal" get a lot fuzzier. Phenomenologically it's something like an improvisatory flow state. Notes are sometimes stacked as a form of temperament upon each other, othertimes stacked to stand for intervallic units, othertimes stacked as rhetorical-melodic settling of momentum in anticipation of or response to other moments within the bar. I was pleasantly surprised that the lower-voices in Section B started out very strong, then went into more of a directional function, and then ended on a cheesy, vaguely jazzy/tropical/latin figure.

Section C (bars 9 & 10) is where the lower-voices got pretty high-drama on my end, so i went, "Okay, I'm gonna HAVE to carry the upper melody across Sections B & C to smoothen this all out". I guess that's why I broke from the melody's key when I hit Section C, because I wanted to take extra care to strike a compromise between the dissonant, confused honesty of bars 10 & 11 and my duty to the listener. The friend who was on my mind was into punk rock when we were growing up, so the rhythms in Section C are meant to callback to pop-punk electric guitar rhythms and (in the upper melody) backbeats & drum fills. A-natural is used all throughout the lower voices in this piece, but in Section C it specifically stands in for the 'Ding!' of a hotel elevator.

Tags: expressionism, noise pop, organ, pseudoragbop, week 14 2026, View by:N_ronvaldez