PSY/OPSogist - Suffused With Static

PSY/OPSogist is a self-made producer working out of rural Virginia who makes hip hop in the vein of DJ Shadow. He has a great taste in sample material (after talking to him I found out he uses The Mars Volta and The Doors) and uses them to great effect. His songs can range from raw and lo-fi to lush and flowing. The album Suffused With Static is one track, meant to be listened to continuously and PSY does a good job of segueing between individual tracks. PSY also makes all of his music free and available online so pass this on to your friends.

Suffused With Static [2008] Download - Review

Prime Meridian - Januaries: 2006-2008

Though this may be a little absurd and self-indulgent, I'm posting my own music. I've never really gotten a band together though I write music and sometimes record. My school has a part of the school year called Winter Study, where we only take one ungraded class. I always went out of my way to take classes that fed into recording. The EP I've posted here is a collection of songs I wrote for the various classes I took, the exception being the first track. The overall sound is very ambient though the final track really expands on "ambient" as a genre by have a much longer arc. I even used a click track. There is no review for this album so I'll provide some helpful (and once again, self-indulgent) liner notes for each track.

All songs were composed in Pro Tools using only the following gear: PRS Santana SE guitar, Line6 Pod Processor, Line6 Tonecore Pedal Echo Park.

1. "Rusting a Perfect Day." This track was written outside of the context of a class. I started messing around with different melodic techniques using features of the Echo Park pedal in F# minor and just started layering parts of different lengths that all ended up propelling the song towards its crescendo.

2. "Hexagrams" gets its name because it was done for the class "Math and Music." It uses serial tranformations of the unordered hexachord (01457) and was composed in a loose adaptation of the twelve tone tradition. The general sound of this chord, when treated as a pitch set that can be used in a scalar fashion, is a mix of phrygian and hexatonic giving the song its somewhat "exotic" melodic lines.

3. "Pearl Silos" was written for an independent study on electronic recording styles. A friend and I had written three hip hop / pop songs in Digital Performer and needed another track, so I offered to write another ambient one in the spirit of tracks 1-2. The result was a further refining of the ideas on the first two tracks. It benefits from having the through-composed layering of "Rusting..." with the disassociation from perfectly tonal practices of "Hexagrams," though the piece in indebted to E as a pitch-center, if not a tonal center.

4. "Odalisque" is more sprawling and was composed against a click track. It has a D/A modal flavor. The structure of the song is three-fold. First the song builts up its component parts in the spirit of post-rock. Then the tonality dissolves as the twelve-tone background ambience overtakes the tonal center (though the main repeated guitar remains), and finally the song returns to its post-rock self with a guitar solo in the spirit of "Muffin Man" by Frank Zappa that takes the song to its close.

Januaries: 2006-2008 [2008] - Download

Do Make Say Think - You, You're a History in Rust

Do Make Say Think's You, You're a History in Rust is one of those albums that missed my Top 15 of 2007 list purely by me being slow to the punch (sorry Ghostlimb). This is a gorgeous album that propels its post-rock songwriting with folk, indie, and alternative influences rather than baroque orchestration or grandiose theme and variation style builds. There is always the semblance of a melodic hook or a regularized chord progression underneath the complex, but grounded arrangements.

You, You're a History in Rust [2007] - Download - Review

Tera Melos (Are Freaks)

Sorry to stray from my norm of just posting albums but these live videos of Tera Melos merit an aberration.

From a set in San Jose, CA

Excerpt from "Last Smile for Jaron"


New track


From a set at Modified

"Spoonful of Slurry"


"When Worms Learn to Fly"


Compilation of TM going crazy


They are so good at their instruments.

Tera Melos - Discography

Tera Melos is a band from Roseville, CA (outside of Sacramento). They play instrumental music that can best be described as a mix of math rock and post-hardcore. They have only released one proper LP (Tera Melos) from when they were a four-piece, but have since released an EP (Drugs to the Dear Youth) and a split CD with By the End of Tonight (Complex Full of Phantoms) as a three-piece. They are pretty awesome live. I saw them in 2006 at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco when they still had Worm in the band. So, below are three albums, two of which have reviews I've written, and a staged live performance of the first two tracks from Drugs to the Dear Youth.

Tera Melos (2005) - Download - Review


Drugs to the Dear Youth (2007) - Download - Review


Complex Full of Phantoms (2007) - Download


A Live Video of "40 Rods to the Hog's Head"