Triumph In Blog

All your burning questions that I have neglected to answer!

It has become apparent that more people may now be aware of what I do with these websites than there were previously. Also, I am now personally aware of the fact that I haven’t used this site as much as I anticipated, and have also not released things in the order I said that I would.

I can fix this! I am creating this page now to answer some of the questions I have received, usually the initial questions I get when I tell people in real life that I “make music.” I will probably append things to this document as time goes on, and I will link to it from my “about” page.

“What kind of music do you make?”

The music of TRIUMPH IN BLACK is not contained to any one sound or genre, and that is purposeful. I find the idea of “genres” useful for categorization from release to release, but I am never thinking about that when I’m writing or producing things. From what it looks like right now, it seems like old fashioned techno is what I’m trending toward, and I like making that and I think I’m good at it. But that’s not the only thing I want to make. I have also made some more flowery, closer to ambient songs that I like, and even some chiptune-type deals. Also, as the name and color scheme of my websites kind of imply, I have an interest in making heavier music in the future, closer to metal. That’s just harder to do by myself.

“Do you make music by yourself?”

As it stands, yes. Some more complex things in the future would involve other people, and I am not opposed to collaboration in any way. But I currently operate in pretty obviously small circumstances. Everything you see and hear on my websites is created by me, for better or for worse, although you can probably tell that I am not above frequent use of homage. At time of writing I have many unreleased works, but rest assured some of them undeniably fall under the dreaded “tribute” umbrella.

“What do you use to make your music?”

I use the free version of Ableton 11 Lite that came with my Focusrite audio controller. This is for a few reasons, chief among them being that I am a cheapskate. However, Ableton specifically does have a very anti-ergonomic and gray UI that I find comforting and tactile, so I prefer it to other free programs. I am limited to 8 tracks however, since it is a shitty free version, which I find to be enough of a challenge to keep me focused on not overcomplicating my work while also being occasionally annoying. If I get pissed off enough in the future, I will likely steal the full version from the same places where I have stolen some of the VST plugins I use. Dump tell no mandy.

“Do you ever make ‘real’ music?”

As a matter of fact, I can sort of play the bass guitar yes, and I often use it and a handful of shitty old electronic keyboards to write things before I render them as MIDIs. I personally do not like to perform, at least not in music terms, and I don’t currently possess the means to properly record all the instruments I might have in the way I might want. I much prefer the control I have over electronic music, and the simplicity of producing and releasing it. Producing recorded waveforms is an entirely different skillset from building and automating MIDIs, although there is obvious overlap at certain points of production. I would be open to recording music as opposed to rendering it, but only if I had other people to work with. I can’t really play guitar very well and I refuse to practice, because I hate playing it. I’m an okay singer, all things considered.

“What made you start doing this?”

I have always been interested in and at least passingly involved in art since I was a child, but never really committed to it when I was young. I come from a family of talented people who often take part in artistic endeavors, but seldom follow through with projects of their own. As I have whined about before, this is likely because we are all from the suburbs of a particularly small and uninteresting city, in a small and uninteresting part of the American evil empire–Indianapolis. It was simply the expectation, not really in a very serious suffocating way, that becoming an adult meant giving up your passions and getting a “real job,” then getting married and having kids and yadda yadda yadda, watching college sports on TV every day until you die. While I was never explicitly told that I couldn’t do anything else–my family has, in fact, always supported me making my own decisions and doing whatever I felt was meaningful to me–growing up in the cynical, christian midwest had an undeniable effect on me when I was young. From the time I was in middle school, it was hard-coded into my brain that art school was a waste of time because you couldn’t get a snazzy programming job with it to set you up as rich for your whole life (this was like 2014, if you were wondering,) so I went through high school never even considering it. I was too busy saying offputting shit to potential sex partners and listening to angry music to think too hard about changing my mind.

When I was in college, I got a STEM degree I didn’t really want. I had some glimpses of art classes, and prior to COVID I was planning to get an art minor. This didn’t pan out, and in the fall of 2023, I was offered a job at a laboratory test contractor that offered benefits and opportunities to promote, so I took it. It was barely 3 months before I realized that I needed an outlet that I didn’t have, and this is where some of my first ideas for TRIUMPH IN BLACK came from. It occurred to me during the time of this shitty job that I had let a lot of outside influences convince me that getting a good job and having an easy life was the endgame, which I think is how a lot of Americans feel. Living the dream of making good money and never taking risks ended up hollowing me out incredibly quickly, and it didn’t take a lot of introspection to understand that I am now too old to be blaming anyone but myself for continuing to sit around being entitled. I am lucky enough to have safety nets up which allow me to commit my free time to doing things I care about, and I will only start living my actual life when I decide to stop being lazy. So, I took out this web domain and started trying to actually make something out of some of my ideas, and I have found it very fulfilling. Frustrating sometimes, yes, and often leaves me feeling a little crestfallen trying to play catch-up with the portfolio of work I should’ve had by now, but fulfilling nonetheless.

The specter of needing a real job still haunts me, but I am now at least wary enough to stray away from sitting around in an office building for years at a time. If I were even more of a narcissist than I am now, I would call this “impostor syndrome,” but I see no need for a specific pathology to describe myself. I think I just need to apply myself and conquer my unfounded fears of making my own decisions.

“Where do you want to go with your music?”

I’m not 100% certain, which I think is a good thing. I consider this less of a specific “project,” and more of just a blanket laid over the top of everything I will make in my whole life heretofore. Maybe I will expand my horizons and become the next “bedroom pop” sensation, when I take one of my drearier piano tracks and disinterestedly whine over the top of it. Or maybe I will end up being a local DJ confined to Indy for all of eternity, doing live New Order remixes for events at various and sundry Marriott hotels until I die of gay sex related illness in my 40s. What I hope for now is that I just make enough things that are quantifiably my own that other artists, more committed and talented people than I, will see some value in it and want to collaborate in some way. At some point, I will probably also try to stop feeling so sorry for myself, but part of that is schtick, you must understand. This is my personal blog, and I find it morbidly funny to inexplicably spill my guts at every turn at the slightest provocation. It’s funnier when I can work the delivery in person, I swear!

“What music influences you?”

This is a question I have mulled over for a long time, and have tried to answer before. As a card-carrying nerd, I for some reason subconsciously find it important to summarize, categorize, and describe to other people what kind of stuff I like and why. In general (for music,) I listen to a huge variety of things, and don’t pay much attention to genre at all. I don’t consider myself a “fan” of really any genre or time period, although there are some times and movements I feel closer to just because of how my childhood listening shook out. I’d say at least 3/4 of what I listen to comes from the 80s, 90s, or 00s, but I also listen to quite a bit of 70s music. I occasionally keep up with current music, but I have found this much more difficult since I started trying to make music of my own. Rather than any specific kind of sound or style, I value more than anything when music is unique, regardless of whether that is necessarily pleasant or gratifying at first. I also love to know about context, and history, and politics. I am usually left cold by the things that are very popular in the American zeitgeist, modern or not, because even without trying to, I have probably already heard them a lot; sometimes, things with an important legacy or an interesting story can break through that for me. I still prefer things that are weird or obscure, nonetheless.

I listen to a lot of metal, far less so now than I did when I was younger, which is something I got into first when I was in high school. When I was a kid, I hated it, because I didn’t understand what was appealing about yelling and harsh noise. Puberty answered a lot of those questions for me, but the journey wasn’t a straight line. I started with things like Metallica, Megadeth, and Dream Theater, but in modern times I listen mostly to demented foreign things like Sodom, Sigh, or Benediction, or frightening walls of noise like Morbid Angel or Sinister. Before metal, I spent my childhood enamored with the post punk of the 80s, primarily the American new wave of the late 70s like Talking Heads and Oingo Boingo, but also British prog pop like Tears for Fears or Level 42. There was also a lot of comedy music old and new, which I will always value incredibly highly. Spike Jones, Weird Al, PDQ Bach, things like that. I also got some of the more progressive classic rock from my Mom, who loves Robert Plant, Chicago, Boston, and Styx. Because of that, I have always had a soft spot for hilarious prog rock like Rush or Dixie Dregs. All that new wave/post punk stuff came from my dad, and that informed my eventual interest in things like DEVO, YMO, Kraftwerk, and Peter Gabriel.

From my older brothers (and from the internet,) I absorbed a lot of other, more contemporary stuff through the 2000s and early 2010s. They’re big into a lot of indie and alt type stuff typical of the era, but I only retained some of that. I generally consider that sphere of music to be one of the few I try to avoid (along with pop country music and conscientious hip hop, these are all things I usually find very vapid,) but I do have an occasional affinity for Vampire Weekend and Red House Painters. Strictly electronic music reared its head for me somewhere around 2007 or 2008, when my brothers’ adventures online brought the family shitty youtube rips and torrented .wav files of Daft Punk, Zapp & Roger, and assorted video game soundtracks. Regarding the second one of those, it’s hard to explain to people how quite a lot of my upbringing involved listening to music that only 57 year old black folks would know, but my grandpa on my mom’s side was deeply entrenched in Motown culture, and we had some of those albums around. Besides Zapp which came later for me, my parents always had the CD of Quincy Jones’s dogshit 90s “comeback” album, “Back on the Block,” which I adore. But to bring it back to electronic music, Daft Punk and Justice were huge for me as a little kid, and trawling youtube/ytmnd for odds and ends is how I discovered more regions and subgenres and online communities of esoteric music than I could possibly list.

This answer is already very long, but that’s a bit of a glimpse into some of my musical influences. It goes much deeper than that, and makes far less sense if I try to remember it all in any kind of sequence. If I had to pick a handful that I think are the biggest influence on my taste and my own style with making music, I would say: New Order, Oingo Boingo, Daft Punk, Brian Eno, TMBG, Cocteau Twins, and The Police are probably the biggest non-metal influences I have, at least as far as things anyone would recognize. I haven’t really made any of my own metal (that I’ve recorded, I’ve written plenty,) but my songwriting is significantly influenced by Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, TOOL, Type O Negative, Gwar, and Paul Speckmann.

“What other modern artists do you like?”

Besides waxing poetic about old music I like, there is some contemporary stuff that matters to me too. Further still, there are some people around my age currently working that I take great inspiration from. I will shout them out in a second, but first, I will describe some of the modern music I like, as complement to my last question.

I keep up with metal a little bit, mostly because metal is a hardcore genre, meaning its proponents were all early adopters of the “live event with 400 acts in it to market to everyone” concept, which everyone kinda does nowadays because the economy is failing. In looking for these, I have run across quite a few newer acts that show some promise, although as young as metal is, a lot of modern metal is actually older bands making comebacks. Among bands formed in this century, some of my favorites are Havok, Toxic Holocaust, Devil Master, Gatecreeper, Sanguisugabogg, Necrot, Pessimist, L.O.T.I.O.N., and Of Feather and Bone. I also have a bit of a soft spot for Animals as Leaders because I think Tosin Abasi is very talented, and I even like a couple strict “hardcore” bands like Death Before Dishonor, mostly because they are inspired enough from the rest of their kin to not just be white trash music, like FFDP or something. Power Trip was also awesome when they were around, and I really liked Evile up until they sort of fell off with the last album, and have since become a little “reddit,” if you will, like that Frozen Soul band. Also, the Municipal Waste/Iron Reagan guys are pretty cool, but Skater Thrash isn’t always my thing. Some of those guys are also allegedly members of Ghoul, a band I like but I find their early work much better than their current. Also, as a last point, I love Dethklok. Of course I love Dethklok. If you knew me, you’d know I love Adult Swim cartoons. I can’t help it!

Modern things that aren’t metal are a little more scattered for me; there are a lot of people I randomly see online sometimes that I think are kind of cool. The people organized enough for me to keep track of them include a number of somber, softcore, depressed women like Anna Von Hausswolff or Grouper, because I find their independent, self-made nature deeply inspiring. Plus I feel sad and somber sometimes. I see a lot of electronic type stuff more often, like 100 Gecs for example, that I find incredibly bold and important. I follow semi-obscure Colombian beatmaker Filmmaker, who I first heard of from an internet friend in a seedy part of the internet around 2019 or so, when he was newer. His work is often frightening and intense, which is a style I would like to find in myself at some point. I also, as you may expect, follow the exploits of Molchat Doma as well, who introduced me to a world of eastern bloc music I was completely ignorant of sometime around my freshman year of college. Through them I discovered Kino, who have become instrumental in inspiring a lot of my music.

Some smaller artists–not even strictly music–that I pay attention to in the same regard may require a bit more looking if you want to know about. My current muse as it were is Chicago illustrator, printmaker, and game developer Cam Collins, whose “COPPER ODYSSEY” video games are actually the subject of some of my upcoming songs and drawings. I also have for a while now followed Boston/NYC gay rockstar Alex Walton and her friends in the “Very Good Band,” who I believe I’ve mentioned before. The painter, sculptor, poet, and game developer Jack King-Spooner, from Scotland, is also a big hitter for me, and his recent game “Judero” is probably the only video game of its kind ever made, if you care about video games like I do. Speaking of which, Russian/Japanese visual novel writer and electronic musician Nikita Kaf is also responsible for some very unique games that made a big impact on me as a young man expanding his horizons (R6 siege stopped being fun so I had to learn to like other kinds of games.) Lastly, I’ll shout out Indianapolis illustrator, printmaker, laser engraver, and animator Hailee Smith as someone I know personally, whose presence in my life has always been a necessary reality check for myself with regards to my art. She has managed to make art a part of her “career” as it were while never sacrificing her own very distinct style, and is one of few people I’ve ever met who ever actually put any of my shitty drawings up in a gallery for people to see. I can’t look at her and then think to blame anyone but myself for not putting my back into my passions. Go check her out at @wyrmzone on instagram, or at haileesmith.com!

“How often do you release music?”

I currently would like to maintain a schedule of 1 release per month. I started out constraining myself to making full albums, but immediately found it kinda torching me, so I have committed to smaller releases. I typically want to cap out around 4 or 5 tracks for releases of that size. I currently have at least one fully locked and loaded, cover art and everything, but I’m waiting a bit. Perhaps I will post about it to generate “Hype?”

“Who or what is that weird little guy in your soundcloud picture? And why is he also on your bandcamp?”

That guy is the DAEMON, a symbolic figure from the mythology of Russian game developer and mystic philosopher Garage Heathen. The DAEMON is the envoy of The Emperor, a noospheric trickster deity known to lead people astray and deceive them into self-destruction. Check out Garage Heathen at https://garageheathen.com/ or follow him on twitter @HeathenGarage to keep up.