Legend of the Ancient Floppy Disks

I started programming MIDI arrangements in 1993 on a Korg O1-W workstation keyboard.  I used the O1-W until 1997 and in that time filled up a few dozen floppy disks with songs, seeds of songs and chunks of songs.  My box of O1-W floppies has been resting in one closet or another for the past two decades.  But this week, with a few days off from work, I decided to sift through these disks and archive all the content in Pro Tools.

What's on them?  SO MUCH STUFF

Almost four hours of music, consisting mainly of snippets that are less than a minute long.  Dozens and dozens of riffs and progressions that can be added to or turned into songs, most of which I'd completely forgotten.  There were even a couple of lost pieces that I had thought about fondly over the years, couldn't quite remember completely, and wished that I'd recorded in some way.  Well... I fuckin DID, and now I have them!!!

I even found this crazy-ass composition called "Antijinx" that was made up of seven 30-second pieces of music, all in related keys but different time signatures and genres.  The pieces were meant to be played simultaneously, two at once (one in each speaker), and cycle so that every piece eventually paired with every other.  The idea was that the seven musical themes were to each repeat 13 times, and this would function as a sort of musical sigil to ward off bad luck (at the time, I was really into John Cage and the role of numerology in his decisionmaking).  Anyway, the resulting mess took up one entire side of a 90-minute cassette and it was way past unlistenable... I put it on in the car for a friend and after about five minutes, he said: "I want to kill you."  I never played it for anyone again.  But maybe I'll make it available for you to suffer through if you so choose.

I now fully expect to die before I run out of material.  I don't know how 18-year-old me generated this much useable content (or why he abandoned almost all of it), but I am grateful to that little shit.