Dan Warren

Hypnospace Outlaw OST vol. 3 is out, including a bunch of songs from me! They're also included in the new content update, which should be dropping on Steam and elsewhere today! This track is an alt-rock reworking of my song for the initial release, Satellite. https://jtholen.bandcamp.com/album/hypnospace-outlaw-ost-vol-3 Lyrics: Back when we were both young and pretty Oh, you had so much to say But things weren't perfect in the city So now you've moved away And my my, look how your star has faded You spend the night at home Practicing your drums for a gig that never comes Casting dirty glances at the phone You've still got mountains in your mind You never even tried to climb You never seemed to have the time You know you used to shine so bright Was that all reflected light? Were you just a satellite? Lord knows, these things get so confusing When you have flown so far Back home the almond trees are blooming But it's autumn where you are And my my, now all the leaves are changing Just like the color of

Everybody loves a good swing cover of a modern song, right?

I decided to see whether I could use the R package "googleLanguageR" to use Google's API for speech-to-text and automate my sampling process for my spoken word fuckery. Answer: very yes. This is just me playing around for a few minutes with clips from Attenborough's "Life Stories".

Here's a draft of a song for Evergreen. Musically it started as an exercise in writing nonfunctional harmony. I've probably pulled this one apart and put it back together more than any other song I've made in recent memory, and I'm still not entirely sure I'm satisfied with it. Lyrics: Brittle fragment of a memory Still and silent over centuries Wake, my love, and greet me Wake, my love, and never never go again Do not forsake me Love, do not forsake me Awaken to me Take a breath now Hesitation is the enemy Every instant is a victory Wake, my love, and greet me Wake, my love, I swear it I swear it can be Everything you wanted Everything forever Forever's not so long Forever's not so long

This is currently slated to be the last track on Evergreen. It's a reprise of the first song, Survival Machines. Regardless of whether anyone else ever likes it, Evergreen is a project I've grown so personally attached to that it's just getting harder and harder for me to be completely satisfied with the arrangement and mix of any given track. Nonetheless, this is one of the ones that I think is closest to exactly what I wanted it to be. Lyrics: And so we hold tight to a lone mote of dust in the infinite night straining ourselves just to cling to the surface our singular purpose to stay side by side and what does it mean that they could have used fear or almost anything but love is lever they've chosen to move us to shape and improve us to keep our lives evergreen? Does that make us survival machines connected like mother and child each needing the other to thrive it's all or it's none that survive

Here's a new take on my song Wretched Beast, with some lovely harmonies provided by Tanja Manners. It still needs a bit of mixing work, but I'm going to be traveling for a while and decided to go ahead and post the rough track because it's darn pretty.

This is just a quick sketch of a song that's still only half-written. I basically sat down to record this just to make sure I wouldn't forget the vocal arrangement I'd thought of, but I ended up liking the way it came out enough to share it. Lyrics: The next time we see each other we will know this dance by heart and we'll do it in that instant, no matter where we are If it's a thousand years before we do, I promise I'll still recognize you Because I hear you in the evening when the crickets sing good night and I see you in the morning in the flicker of the light In every single thing I see and do, in some small way I recognize you You're burned into me deep For everything I keep forgetting I will always recognize you I don't believe in heaven, but I'd be happy to be wrong I'd like to think that somehow you and I will carry on Whatever life may turn us both into, I know I'll always recognize you

Just a weird little song I came up with as an experiment. I actually had the idea for the weird vocal sound first and wrote the song around it, and I think it worked out surprisingly well for having been written from the top down like that. The percussion is mostly one of Sound Dust's chaos engine thingies, and that lovely synth in the chorus is Samplephonics' Dirty Modular. Lyrics: At the bottom of the ocean There are colors nobody sees You have your own, in unguarded moments You share with me You let me see There's a certain smallest distance That is allowed by electricity Staying within those physical limits Come close to me Just as close as you can be Come closer Take and surround me Gently Please come close to me At the moment of creation When everything was just energy There was a process set in motion To bring you to me Just as close as you can be Come closer Take and surround me Gently Please come close to me

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It's been a while since I've uploaded something, and unfortunately I'm traveling again so I can't record much at the moment. Until I get something else put together, here's a noisy living room recording of a song I've never released before. I threw this together in Australia as a demo just so I wouldn't forget the song, and I've been meaning to get back to it for years now.

This is a track I did for Jay Tholen's new video game, Hypnospace Outlaw. Within the game, the song is by an imaginary 90's alt-folk band called Barnaby's Chair. https://store.steampowered.com/app/844590/Hypnospace_Outlaw/ Lyrics: Back when we were both young and pretty Oh, you had so much to say But things weren't perfect in the city So now you've moved away And my my, look how your star has faded You spend the night at home Practicing your drums for a gig that never comes Casting dirty glances at the phone You've still got mountains in your mind You never even tried to climb You never seemed to have the time You know you used to shine so bright Was that all reflected light? Were you just a satellite? Lord knows, these things get so confusing When you have flown so far Back home the almond trees are blooming But it's autumn where you are And my my, now all the leaves are changing Just like the color of your hair Time flies, soon everything looks strange and A chill is in the air You've still got mount

This is a slightly rearranged and remastered version of something I've uploaded before. I think it's close enough to a final version as makes no difference at this point. Lyrics: Oh you temporary thing departing since the moment you arrived you know you can't survive this on your own you solitary thing now reaching out in hopes that you will find that another of your kind is reaching too Some signal in the static peeking through; there's something out there looking out for you and hey, you know it might be true You ordinary thing, less different than you want to believe yet terrified to leave your gun at home, you sedentary thing now dying only inches from your birth the master of the earth for all you knew You looked around and found nothing to do but never thought to blame your point of view and say, "you know this can't be true" "There must be more than this a message that we missed I just know somehow this can't be all, this can't be all" Oh no, you broken nameless thing cast up in ragged pieces on

Lemme get pompous for a second: I've always loved the idea of the unreliable narrator in music, because I think people are a lot less prepared for it in that situation than they typically are when reading prose, watching a movie, or something like that. I think there's something about setting words to music that tends to circumvent people's skepticism and perceive the lyrics as fundamentally honest, rather than as a work of fiction. Having a first person perspective where the viewpoint is either unreliable or kind of a shithead is really interesting, because people tend to take that personally in a weird way. On that note, here's a song that starts off sounding like a take on the "I'm broken and you can fix me" school of love songs, but as it goes on you sorta realize that the person in question isn't just emotionally screwed up but in fact mentally unstable. I had this idea of doing an entire album based around this idea, where it starts off as just a sort of romantic story but it turns out that the narr

I don't often post things that are this new and unpolished, but I haven't had much time to record lately and it's been a while since I posted something. It's a pretty simple song anyway, so it doesn't require much.

Just an old track that I put together as a test run for a project that I never really finished. Samples were taken from the audiobook of Almost Astronauts, by Tanya Lee Stone.

Just a cute little song about being self-conscious about your strangeness. Lyrics: I built my house with my own two hands and a substance I secrete out of special glands yeah, it's true so can you I built my car out of subway trash chewing gum wrappers, cigarette ash and glue it's just a thing I do And if it's weird, well then it's weird and that's all right with me because it's real and it's honest and it's true So if it's weird, then it's weird and that's just how it's gonna be I only hope it isn't too weird for you I live my life like a Markov chain a bunch of things that I do that I can't explain to you strange but true I built my love out of empty space a little hollow vacant place that you fit into And if that's weird, well then it's weird and that's just how it's gonna be because it's real and it's honest and it's true So if it's weird, then it's weird and that's all right with me I only hope it isn't too weird for you I really do I hope that it's not too weird for you

This is basically a first draft, but I think it sounds good enough to put out there. Lyrics: You hit me like the sound of thunder You rattle me and leave me steaming And all that I can do is wonder What happened to me? Am I dreaming? But no, the world I knew is torn asunder In its place a new thing growing I don't even try to understand it, I'm content just knowing You cut through me like the wind in winter A mockery of my defenses And leaving my resolve in splinters You humble me and leave me senseless Oh, you glorious calamity You hurricane You sweet destroyer All you do is glance at me and something in my head says boy, you're Doomed, you've fallen farther than you first assumed Give up and just prepare to be consumed It hits me like a sweet starvation A hollow little place inside me I'm overcome with desperation The only thing to satisfy the need would be another kiss from you One more embrace The sound of your voice I've given up resisting you I see your face and I have no choice I'm doomed, I've f

Here's a rough draft of another track for Evergreen. Lyrics: Will you lose it all because you're afraid to choose? Will you lose it all because you're afraid to choose? When the time has come to pick a side, will you simply refuse and say there's nothing you can do, when you know that it's not true? You defined yourself with things that you consume With your wine, your wealth, your car and your perfume So when someone bought the same things and that person became you there was nothing you could do, from that moment you just had this feeling as though something quite significant was lost but you can't quite define what it was And now you rise and fall like an empire every day as you build your walls just to watch them all decay Maybe nothing much is gained by it, but somehow that's okay all that anyone can say is that it had to be that way when any meaning you might find would be subjective anyway And hey, you did your best to keep the darkness away

From my 2013 album A Series of Tasteful Nudes. Originally written for a contest where we were tasked with writing a song about...you'll never guess...Jagadish Chandra Bose. I won! iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/a-series-of-tasteful-nudes/665149660 Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Tasteful-Nudes-Explicit-Dan-Warren/dp/B00DJMOGK6/ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/2lbvzJ51Cgh1i8s5sPIh0J Subscribe to the International House of Dancakes podcast on iTunes, or using this url: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheInternationalHouseOfDancakes

In memory or Art Bell, here's a track from one of my very early experimental samplewankery albums where Art and one of his colleagues were discussing repeated sightings of the mystical Ted Koppel.