Light of the World (light_of_the_world.it)

 Completed July 1997.

I have a lot to say about this song, not so much because of the song itself, but because of the time I wrote it.

This was my one and only song from the summer of 1997, believe it or not. Well, the one and only song that survived. You see, our family computer, which we had owned for about 18 months, decided to have a hard drive crash that summer, and I lost a few songs. Thankfully, I had backed up most of them, which survive to this day. The only songs I recall losing were CPDP 2 and the Triangle Man songs.

Wait, CPDP 2? Yes, I took another summer programming class. In this programming course, I had more friends along for the ride, including Pretzel, who also did mod music. There were five of us, and we decided to work together to make a game called Triangle Man. I did most of the music - I made one song to play during the first level, but technical limitations meant we could only have interstitial music between levels. So, I made six between-level tunes, one of which was based on that first level song I had made. The game didn’t end up working at all, but we still got an A in the class.

Naturally, I also composed a sequel to the original CP/DP. It wasn’t much different, but had some refinements and added a trumpet part to it. How I recall these details so many years later and only having had the song in my possession for a few weeks, I have no idea. Unless my friends happen to still have copies of those songs (unlikely) they are gone forever: the hard drive crash destroyed all songs that I had not backed up.

Meanwhile, an event was taking place that I just had to participate in: Music Contest 5. It was hosted by the Hornet Archive, which by this point was my go-to source of mod music. This was the first actual, real contest I entered. Defying all logic, I entered into the intermediate category instead of rookie. I recall putting together parts of the song at my class (I ferried it to and from home on a floppy disk). It’s possible the hard drive crash happened while I was composing the song and had to finish it on the class computers.

If that’s true, it explains the song’s mediocrity. Light of the World was uninspired. I really didn’t put very much care into it. The idea was to blend orchestral music and techno, but the implementation just wasn’t that great. I was relying way too much on sequence samples (some patterns are literally just two beatloops and an arp playing) and didn’t attempt to make anything complex or interesting. The people who judged my song told me as much, and I took most of their suggestions to heart: every song I made after this one was better than all of the songs before and including this one.

I think the violin staccato sample may have been of my own creation. None of the others are. I am not sure where I got the beat loop, arp sequence, and weird singing samples from. The arp and vocal samples I’m pretty sure I got from a sample pack and not another song.

I wish I’d put together an actually good song for MC5, but under the circumstances it may not have been possible. Needless to say, I did not advance to the second round in MC5. I still loved participating and entered again the following summer with Unspoken Thoughts. MC5 produced a lot of great music, such as Nine One One and martian lovesong. So while my song wasn’t very good, I’m still glad I made it.
- arcturus