C.o.t.C.F. (Soundtrack) notes

The 10th anniversary album (Lum) is almost ready, but I'm going to wait until next month to talk about it, so for now here's:

C.o.t.C.F. soundtrack (2011) - Except for the first song on it, this album was recorded in about an hour and a half in one night. I was working on Robot MonStar during the same time period that I was working on a short film, and was using the keyboard to come up with some ideas for the background music in the movie.  I don't know if I came up with this music first or the songs on Robot MonStar, but I want to say that I came up with the main riff for "Breathe Like an Alien" on the same night I did this. The first song from the album (Boots) is more in line with my older material, because it was actually music from an unfinished song.

Radioset 10th anniversary and more notes

While last year marked the 10th/or 11th? anniversary of the first live show, this year marks 10 years since the first Radioset studio album was released. So this year I'll actually update the blog (or whatever those things are called now) with random facts about the albums and things.  And today I'll do Robot MonStar...

Robot MonStar (2011) was the fifth album. It was meant to be a concept album, surrounding themes of science and sci-fi, and sound very electronic and mechanical. I wanted it to be very Devo influenced. I had gotten access to a keyboard, and spent some time playing around with it, figuring out how to play stuff and playing with the different effects settings. I discovered one that sounded really new wave, and kind of 8-bit. I came up with the idea for the song Quark, and then went on from there, coming up with similar material for a "new-wave" album. I had a lot of ideas for gimmicks, like song titles that were highly complex math equations. The release date of Nov. 1  was chosen so as to look like a binary sequence (110111) when written. The album wasn’t ready in time for release in October, due to the cover art not being complete, but ideally I would have liked to have it out on Oct. 1 (100111), or Oct. 10 (101011). The album title was supposed to reflect the mechanical and science/sci-fi elements. MonStar is the name of the main villain from the mid-eighties Rankin-Bass outer-space cyborg action cartoon, Silverhawks; and Robot Monster is the name of a 1950's sci-fi film. The album was meant to be longer, but I was working on it at the same time as a video project, and that ate into a lot of the time. A couple of orphaned song ideas ending up in the video instead of being finished for the album. But I think it holds up pretty well, and I still like it.

Radioset notes (part ii): Robot MonStar

This is probably about a year late, but here's some notes about the latest studio album, Robot MonStar:


- It was intended to be a new wave/sci-fi concept album.
- The title is based off of the 1953 monster film Robot Monster, and Mon*Star, the main villain from the 1986 Silverhawks animated series.
- The release date (Nov. 1, 2011) was chosen because it looked like binary code when written (110111).
- The album has a shorter run-time, since filming/music was also being done at the same time on the short horror film, "Curse of the Chicken Fucker".
- Complex mathematical equations were considered being used as song titles early on.
- The album cover was taken from the first in a series of link-able paintings: