Traded Society for Technology

Traded Society for Technology is my 26th album, released May 19, 2008. Around the time of the release of this album I went through my creative works & looked for words/phrases that would make good song titles. In 2004 I had been doing this mostly after I had recorded the songs. In 2007-2008 I picked the song titles placed them into releases that I would make artwork for then I would record them & arrange the track order when the albums were done.

Traded Society for Technology was originally set to be the follow up to Sound Without Effect. Sound Without Effect took its song titles from the Freezer Freezer Problem Artbook which was a spin-off to the Equal Non-Equal Neutral Artbook which is where Traded Society for Technology gets most of its song titles from. Traded Society for Technology was going to have tons of tracks but I ended up splitting the track titles into multiple releases (The Stars Are in the Sky Hollowed Out, Today & The Years Gone Bye, & even 2010's Norvon Mac).

Traded Society for Technology was recorded at the same time as both The Stars Are in the Sky Hollowed Out & Today & The Years Gone Bye. Today & The Years Gone Bye was recorded (but never handed to) the RPM challenge which challenged people to make entire albums in February of only original songs. So Traded, which recording started for in January, was put on hold to make Today & The Years Gone Bye, which became my most acclaimed album. Many songs from The Stars were written/recorded alongside Traded & the songs were placed into the different releases depending on the feel of the album with Traded being more experimental & computerized & The Stars being more instrumental. As of 2013 I'm still doing this. I'm currently writing/recording songs for 4 different albums & placing the songs in each one depending on the feel of the song. Today however I am titling the songs after their recordings rather than going by a large list to fulfill.

Track Look Back

1. Iuff Iick
This song does have one of the actually interesting stories of all my songs. The grumbling digital sounds come from a device implanted in a Garfield shirt I got around 1995-96. It was a shirt that played a huge burp when you pressed the device in the stomach of the shirt. The device however stuck out of the shirt & me being fat, it really stuck out so I think I only wore the shirt once to school. I kept this shirt for over 10 years. I noticed the burping sound was garbled & digital sounding when I pushed the button (possibly due to low battery) so I cut the device out of the shirt before throwing the shirt away. I loved the sound of it so I recorded it for a few minutes pushing or grinding the rubber button with my thumb. The sounds it made are unedited. I made the strings & piano afterwards to spruce it up & make it a full song. To me the song is very soothing. One of the soothiest I've ever done. You want to talk experimental? 3 minutes of a distorted burping from a mid-90s children's novelty t-shirt contrasted with beautiful piano & strings should qualify! I did eventually throw the device away, not seeing a use for it for another song. I had a picture of it on the MARS MySpace calling it a "sampler" as it it were some cool analog nub controlled thing I invented. But it is a sampler though, it samples 1 burp.

The song title was impossible to truly type out. The original artwork gave the idea of it being capital Is or Capital Ts. So the unofficial alternate title is Tuff Tick. Tick as in the bug because they are tuff.


 2. Q
The funny thing about this title is that it is actually taken from the Artbook.

3. Dos?t
4. of d(t)his

5. Ign(orant)ition
Sorta does have a car starting sound/rhythm.

6. HAUT

7. Tegnogk
Title appeared in the Artbook on a fake index page. Instead of there being all page numbers symbols appear as "numbers." It says Tegnogk is on page six legged pink spider. So if that fake page was sound this would be it.

8. Baseless Cavern
Close compositionally to songs from 2007 with a little similar tonality but produced up enough to be much better.

9. ehdca
This title doesn't appear in the Artbook but in appears in some concept art for it which is also the comic Forever Fog.

10. Homeless Land

11. )ho[bb[le
I had a list of song titles to choose from while recording songs. This song became )ho[bb[le & it has a hobbliness to it.

12. Traded Society for Technology

13. Answer Kidge Appears in this video because it sounds futurey.
 

14. Able to camp anvils?/
This was the title of a speech I did for speech/drama 1 in 10th grade. The speech was about the compassionate putting of anvils in Indian reservation like camps. This speech was so stupid & being preceded by even stupider speeches that I was almost kicked out of the class. I never Thought I'd make any of these things into songs & I really need to scatter the songs around the site to link it all together. This title does appear in the Artbook, I'm not sure if the speech title was taken from there or if it was a reference to the speech.

15. Rock drick garden
I used a bells VST instrument that I liked so this became a single the day of the album's release. Laslo PanafleX came up with this phrase "Rock drick garden" December 6, 2000. It appeared in the Equal Non-Equal Neutral Survey in the Artbook as something to respond to. His full writing was "rock drick garden for throwing sharks at fence broom piano leg."

16. Kettle Scrim
Kettle Scrim is a hot burst of tap water.

17. What If!

18. Fogless Sight
Fog appears in song titles of mine quite a bit. The original artwork titled Fogless Sight in the artbook was used for the September 2004 single Reverse Invertion.

19. Text-tile

20. Label + (Hold)
This is also a bells song & was the album's first single, released March 19, 2008.

21. Leasing any lacer

22. Chances no longer exist
This was maybe the second time I had done the, play the same song again with different arrangements thing. The first being the closing track, though this one appears first on the album. I've done this a few times since, most significantly in 2012's A.M. Rang a Song. I'm fine with milking beauty & experience out of a tune. Most pop/rock songs repeat the same exact same music per verse & the exact same per chorus so I do something like that but different with the same full tune but diff instruments playing it.

23. Incompliable

24. We.are.close.now.so come. on.in
This song takes a similar approach to the opening track Iuff Iick but with different instrumentation & noises. The change of the distortions is very subtle. The title is close as in closed rather than close as in near. In the Artbook it appeared that way saying "We.are.closed.now.so. come. on.in" The new title goes with the eeriness of the song.

25. !question of intelliline?
This phrase also came from Laslo PanafleX December 6, 2000. The MARS website says that  the song was "originally composed on a toy touch tone phone." Thankfully I wrote that then because I have no memory of doing it. This is also a repeat the same song with different arrangements track.

Download the full album in MP3 or OGG.

Listen to the full album with the original artwork for each song title.