I got my bachelor’s at Bimm London. I studied there from 2015-2018 and my final project was an album. My advisor for the project was Simone Tanda. The full title of the album is: “An Attempt At Explaining How Inconceivable Reality Is.” A year before I made the album I wrote an essay with the same title on how we form ideas about the world around us based on discrete data as opposed to continuous. The essay turned out to be completely incomprehensible. But I got a sufficiently pretentious album title that actually alludes to the concept of the album, which is musical absurdist comedy. I’m not sure it got a lot of laughs however. I mainly wanted to do electronic music production related humour. What do I mean by that? I wanted to intentionally do things “wrong” for a humorous effect. My favorite pieces from the album are “At” and “Inconceivable”. They’re the 2 longest tracks on the album(standing at 8 and 12 minutes respectively) and are entirely instrumental. I think they’re funny but also quite pretty.

Some of the following music is scattered all over the internet. Some can only be found on Spotify, some only on Soundcloud and some on youtube on the Innit Memes channel. These are works that I feel are relevant to the previously discussed album in various ways. Below are links to my artist profile.

This one was a huge milestone for me. If you know my more recent work you'll know that I make music generators. This song came before all that, but at the time I believed that a machine would be able to analyze our individual music listening experiences, in real time and change the music on the fly to suit our needs. Thus creating a perfect piece of music that only satisfies our own tastes and nobody else's. I had been trying for years to make music that would do this by trying to understand my own tastes. Mind you that I didn’t believe it was possible at the time but then one day while creating an absurdist ode to everything annoying it finally happened. I created a piece of music that accurately captured my tastes at the time and I saw nothing wrong with. Nothing needed to be added or taken away.

Since then the song has lost its magic. Most music, if not all, will do this over time. Some songs are loved for some time, then hated, only to be liked again years later. Our opinions of a track will change as we age. I didn’t think this would last forever but it was nice to capture it for a short period of time. The milestone revolved around creating a piece of music that I, and nobody else, would consider perfect. I think that goal was achieved because when I turned it in that same semester it barely got a pass.

This song is part of my “Absurd-Youtube” series. I have spent a lot of time on the platform over the years and thought it was time that I used the content on there for art. The idea was to find vloggers talking for extended periods of time, edit the audio and finally juxtapose what they were saying with music for comedic effect.

In my view, it starts off a bit funny and ventures into depressing territory as it progresses. People's reaction to this song varies greatly with age.

Here is another song from the “Absurd-Youtube” series that deals with politics. Not really though. I decided to include this because when I made it I was certain that it didn’t convey some sort of political stance but everyone I show it to thinks otherwise.

Perhaps having insanely insensitive lyrics in a song only works for Slayer.

Shout-out to Rebekka Sif for providing the vocals. If you read what I said about “Enter Sad-Man by Guns and Rose” earlier then you might remember that I barely got a pass when I turned it in one semester. Of course I was a bit disappointed when the only explanation I got was essentially that it was missing a singer and lyrics. So I made this song in retaliation and turned it in the next semester. Here I wrote lyrics that are repeated over and over again but the words are rearranged to create new sentences. The lyrics also ask the listener whether they’re actually listening to the music or not. Originally there was an excerpt from David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” speech but I took it out.

The song was a bit meanspirited and I do regret it. I just didn’t want to focus on using music to establish a persona but rather to create an emotional rollercoaster without a narrative. I guess it wasn’t up to me however. This song got a higher grade than the previous one.

Here a persona is established. I sing on this one. Or rather talk, in Icelandic. I wanted to demonstrate how absurd our preconceived notions of what constitutes normal songs are. I tried burying the vocals (they got a bit too buried) and slam the limiter. The whole thing is a joke and if you don’t speak Icelandic then you won’t get it. Sorry.

The character in this song has often been described as very-much-me by those closest to me.

The following material came after the album was finished. I think it reflects how my relationship with absurdist comedy changed over the course of 2 years.

If you read about the previous 2 songs on this page you might have jumped to the conclusion that I dislike lyrics and narratives. Couldn’t be further from the truth. When this little gem came into my life I was mostly interested in using generative systems to create the material but I added lyrics on top of this one. Here you can hear a hint of my relationship with absurdist thinking but I’m not sure if the comedic element is clear. The lyrics feature the word “and” a ridiculous amount of times, which I think would be an attempt at humour, but it all sounded very sad to me once the song was completed. All the vocals were provided by Lucy, a vocaloid from emvoice.

I remember laughing while writing the lyrics. The singer sings so emotionally about nothing and everything at the same time with an extremely limited vocabulary. Perhaps the simplicity of the message is what makes me sad.

Mirjam wanted a song for Christmas back in 2019. I had to make one using her vocals so I used a random recording I had on my phone. There is hardly any comedy here but she laughed. Kinda just included it because I think it is very good.

I think that musical absurdism has become synonymous with untraditional instrumentation at this point.

I don’t consider this to be a comedic piece. I had the computer generate a bunch of midi and put it on a timeline in Ableton. Then I tried to make it sound like it was being played on a real piano by a human player, or two.

The reason I included it here has to do with the title. I don’t think there is any reason to get into it but in short all of the comedy related to this piece has to do with how it was presented. Here musical comedy was just a distant memory that I was trying to get away from.

This track came into existence with the help of Supercollider, the Composers Desktop Project and a recording of me playing the drums. No comedy whatsoever. Absurd? Maybe, is there a logical progression here? I’m not sure.

Did I mention I play the drums? This track is just me on the drums and a whole lot of processing. In my view it is a fairly traditional suspenseful track.

That’s it! You’ve read about my entire musical absurdist comedy journey. How it went from happy to sad to non-existent. I mostly focus on music generators these days but will occasionally concern myself with other musical endeavours. In the next section, titled "Gloomy Vibes", you’ll read about my time at IUA and get a more in-depth look at what working with generative audio systems does to a human person.