Tell Me I Can Fix This On My Own is a mini-album of peculiar pop songs by Deerful, aka Emma Winston (aka me!), coded in the music programming language ixi lang between July and August 2018, and released on 1st September 2018.
You can buy the record in digital format on Bandcamp, or listen on iTunes/Spotify/Deezer/Tidal/whatever your preferred service. If you back my Patreon, you'll also get access to the audio stems for remixing, if that's your thing.
Since ixi itself is open source, I've made the code available here to be played with. The files cannot be opened directly in ixi as far as I know, but must be copied and pasted into the coding window.
In a number of places I have defined snapshots, which are groups of sounds and sequences that can be recalled simultaneously. I can't find an easy way to provide these along with the code, so you will need to set them up yourself. Evaluating snapshot -> one will store a snapshot with the name 'one' which can be recalled by running snapshot one (with no arrow). I usually leave the storage code at the bottom of the file, and the code for recalling at the point in the file where I would actually switch to the snapshot when playing live.
The album uses a number of samples which I cannot freely provide in their original form due to licensing rules, so at the bottom of each file I have listed where these are used with a rough description of the sample, and its original pitch (to ensure everything plays in the correct key).
If this all sounds a little confusing, it's because it is - ixi isn't really meant to store static ideas of fixed length in this way, it's a language for playing live and in real-time, but hopefully this gives you something to play with and mash up, as a starting point.
I learned ixi lang in an academic creative practice workshop in 2016, then subsequently forgot all about it. Late one night in July, alone in my living room, something prompted me to reopen it and I fell in love. Before I knew it, I'd been booked for a laptop music festival, on the grounds that I'd written enough material to play a full live set. This was the result.
It's mostly a record about friendship. It's also a record about loss. It’s about the visceral connections that bind you to other people and refuse to let go even when they’re physically absent, but it’s also about the realisation that you are the only person who can steer your own life, and the terror and grief and joy and liberation that affords. I’ve written and released it so quickly because it felt like I had to, like there were too many stories I needed to tell to keep them inside any longer.