the bonk way is my collaborative contribution to The Four Seasons of Bonk Wave: Autumn Waves 3 Sample Challenge

I didn’t know what to do with this edition’s sample pack. I lack the required chops (I am sample-challenged), and I said as much on Mastodon... That’s when C.Circo (@CCirco@ravenation.club) came to the rescue by suggesting we collaborate on a track, and this is the result. The lyrics are an ode to the ethos of #bonkwave, and an expression of my gratitude towards C.Circo, who embodies that ethos.

It was mastered by Ordos Mk.0 (@ordosmarkzero@ravenation.club)

You can hear it alongside a ton of other great #bonkwave sample-challenge tracks on The Four Seasons of Bonk Wave: Autumn Waves 3

You can also find it on my Faircamp site, which has an exhaustive collection of bonkwave-related materiel.

Finally, the bonk way is available on my shiny new hand-crafted music site.

I was interviewed by Sam (@ethicalrevolution@climatejustice.social) about my new album offbeat over on #NHAM.

Read the interview →

As I wrote on Mastodon in what turned out to be an interminable chronicle of the making of offbeat :

I’ve never released an album. I write and publish individual songs that progressively outline and become part of albums, sometimes jumping around from one album to the next.

But collaborating on projects on the fedi has taught me something I usually lack : patience. Weeks or months often go by between the moment I finish a song and its release.

Which has probably put me in the necessary headspace to think of a whole album before I’ve actually finished any of the songs.

The idea for the album came from the song I wrote for the Four Seasons of Bonk Wave: Autumn Waves album back in October 2025. I usually write silly songs, or topical songs about ideas or issues, political or otherwise, and have released rather few personal, inward-looking songs in all my decades of making music. But Downfall was my first, serious, earnest #bonkwave track, which is what got the ball rolling, and so after some hesitation and prodding from early listeners, I included (a remastered version of) Downfall on offbeat.

I’m definitely stepping out of my comfort zone with this album, as all the songs are about me, or say a lot about me in a less roundabout way than usual, and not always in a very flattering light. But hopefully, they will still appeal and speak to people who don’t have my particular brand of oddballness (I just realized I could have called the album oddball instead of offbeat, but I’ll stick to the more musical option...).

And hopefully, it will be an interesting ride for regular folks too.

Musically, the album is quite varied (no two songs are in the same key, and meters vary from three to four to five to six or maybe even 12), even though the songs always somehow end up sounding like my slightly oddball, offbeat pop songs. Probably because I never worry about making them sound like proper pop songs that follow proper pop song conventions. I let the words dictate the melodies, which dictate the harmonic and song structures, and the arrangements are then dictated by a mixture of personal taste, available tools and instruments, degree of (im)patience, number of spoons, musical chops and lack thereof and of course, serendipity. The result is what it is, for better or for worse, although hopefully the former.

In other words, I hope you enjoy the album, which you can listen to and/or download in the usual places:

• My shiny new hand-crafted music site.
• My Faircamp site
• Mirlo
• Bandwagon.fm
• Oh, and as an experiment, I also created a dedicated javascript-free page for the album.

I would like to thank Emma and Sam (@ethicalrevolution@climatejustice.social) and a lot of lovely people on the fediverse for their encouragement and support.

Last but certainly not least, I would like to thank Ordos Mk.0 (@ordosmarkzero@ravenation.club) for expertly and enthusiastically mastering the album.

Downfall was written back in October for the Four Seasons of Bonk Wave fall album, which was appropriately released in spring (if you’re in the northern hemisphere like me :)

Downfall also sparked and opens my upcoming album, offbeat. For now, you can hear it alongside a ton of other great #bonkwave tracks on The Four Seasons of Bonk Wave: Autumn Waves 2 (Autumn Waves is actually a triple album!)

You can also find it on my Faircamp site, which has an exhaustive collection of bonkwave-related materiel.

Finally, Downfall is available on my shiny new hand-crafted music site.

And thank you to @ordosmarkzero@ravenation.club for mastering the track!

If you’ll pardon a little music geekery, all these months after having written and recorded the song, I’m still kind of amazed by how moving from D minor to D minor 7 (pretending is phony...) changes the feel of the song. And it’s not just the arrangement or the harmonies. I get the same effect when I’m just strumming an acoustic guitar.

Also, don’t ask me why, but I remember that when I sat down to write the music, my initial idea was to make a song with a lot of silence in it. I mostly failed, but still.

Hot on the heels of my smash hit Ukulele Bonk video (and my sleeper hit Bercée d’illusions video), I am pleased and proud to present a new, hand-animated video for my 2024 track Driven By Desire about making art in the age of slop machines.

If you’re curious (and since some people asked), here’s how it was made. CW: probably TMI!

Animation

Since the launch of The Indie Beat Television, I thought it would be fun and appropriate to make a crude, hand-animated video for this track about the slopapocalypse. Then version 2.0 of Procreate Dreams, an animation program for iPad based on the acclaimed Procreate drawing app, came out, and I figured I would try that.

I started creating short animations in Procreate Dreams on my iPad mini, usually while sipping coffee in bed in the mornings. As the days rolled by, I settled more or less consciously on a few arbitrary rules for the video:

• I selected a single, silly photo of myself and decided I wouldn’t use any others
• All the drawing animations would be done by hand, one image at a time, the old-fashioned way
• I would only draw using thick, rough, dirty brushes
• Keyframe animations would only be used to animate the photo and the backgrounds (and to cycle through colors)

The cool thing about Procreate Dreams, is that you can layer and group and mix flipbook animations and keyframe animations. And each flipbook animation can have multiple tracks, plus use drawing layers. I only scratched the surface of what this program can do!

It also has a lot of export options, so that simplified things a lot.

Once I had a fairly decent bunch of snippets, I started thinking about how to assemble them.

Final Assembly

Then, as luck would have it, a new version of Final Cut Pro was released, which added beat detection to audio files (in order to be able to snap video clips to the beat), a huge potential time server! But I first had to upgrade my macOS to install the new version, and it turned out the beat detection feature has a nasty crash bug which I had to figure out how to circumvent.

• importing audio snippets back into some Procreate Dreams animations, and adjusting the animations to match the tempo as best as I could
• having to tediously stretch or shorten certain clips a little in FCP to snap them more or less to the bars and beats

I tried to use FCP as little as possible to animate things, even though it has a keyframing system. I ended up doing cut animations when I zoom in or out of a clip, and animating the 2 small flying heads that float up behind the big flying head. I also used a couple of FCP plugins to shake certain clips (the second part of the Love me 2 clip for example).

One thing I did use though, was green-screen keying. I modified certain animations in Procreate Dreams to add a green screen background so I could composite them into the video (the bouncing sound wave in part 2 for example).

Finally, to answer another question I got in the chat when the video premiered on The Indie Beat Television, the assembly phase in FCP (and going back and forth into Procreate Dreams to tweak things) took a couple of days.

I ended up making more animations than I actually used (see the one below), and had to make a few hard choices, but it is precisely the accumulation of countless choices, big and small, conscious and unconscious, logical or arbitrary and driven by desire that is missing in slop, which is one of the many reasons it is so utterly soulless.

Thank…

Hot on the heels of my Ukulele Bonk video, which went kind of viral for a few days among my followers on Mastodon, comes a simpler, more subdued video for Bercée d’illusions, a song from my last EP that I’m particularly fond of. Like the previous video, it premiered on The Indie Beat Television, during the new Friday Fresh hour, and the lovely people in the chat seemed to like it.

All shots in the video are 100% real and in real-time, which seems worth mentioning in a world choking on slop.

Well that escalated quickly.

I made a video for Ukulele Bonk, my contribution to The Four Seasons of Bonk Wave: A Midsummer Bonk’s Dream 1, in a single cold winter day, and barely a week after the launch of The Indie Beat Television.

This is actually the first real video that I’ve made since... 2018!

As a seasoned person, I was alive when MTV launched, and part of me has always lamented the indisputable fact that video killed the radio star. In my experience, many people confuse watching and listening to music, and have lost the ability to separate the two and actually develop a decent ear for what is happening in the music alone.

Nevertheless...

I was part of the small group of musicians corralled by @limebar@mastodon.social to prepare the launch of #TIBtv, and seeing the excitement before, during, and after the launch was, well, an eye-opener. And contagious. Not only that, but the variety and quality and originality and ingenuity of the videos blew my mind.

(I also contributed some old videos to the channel and the associated songs found a new public, which was a nice bonus.)

Anyway, stimulated by such an amazing display of unbridled creativity, my brain started racing with ideas for new videos, and this is the first one to see the light of day. Others may or may not follow, time will tell, but be that as it may:

Creativity x Community = Inspiration!

Long live #TIBtv!

A song that I wrote and recorded before overthinking it. The idea (and the key to the song) came from a dream, which says a lot. You can listen to Choo-Choo Train on:

• my brand-new hand-crafted music site
• my trusty Faircamp site

Sample challenge! Wannawadda is my last-minute contribution to the The Four Seasons of Bonk Wave: A Midsummer Bonk’s Dream 2 sample challenge.

Weaved into this compilation are the tracks that people put together in response to the first inaugural Bonk Wave Sample Challenge that was served up right in time for the Summer-themed compilation.

I don’t know what was more fun, making this, or listening to how all the other bonkwavers rose up to the challenge?

Hot on the heels of his smash hit Hi It’s Spring, I was delighted to partner again with Sam (@ethicalrevolution@climatejustice.social) on Better Than That. The song is included on The Four Seasons of Bonk Wave: A Midsummer’s Bonk Dream 1, and you’ll also find it on this Faircamp page, along with an alternate mix.

Breaking news: check out Sam’s amazing video!

Credits:

Music, lyrics, lead vocals, lead guitar by Sam Keyboards, guitar, background vocals by sknob Arranged and mixed by sknob Mastered by @ordosmarkzero@ravenation.club