"Cruvsa Dristrop" is an album of pieces ("songs") created between mid July and mid August 2019 using Mixcraft and Soundplant programs on a Lenovo computer.  The titles of the album and the songs are nonsense words that I adapted from surrealist poems that I wrote.  They are meaningless and are meant only to identify the tracks.  The basic tracks are a combination of prefabricated public domain loops (drums and instrument phrases, mostly edited and recombined) and original elements using virtual (sampled) instruments in Mixcraft.  Soundplant was used to add sampled elements such as prepared piano, glitch electronics, orchestral brass, and female voice (sliced and recombined individual phonemes from an English phrase tutorial).

​In this album I spent much more time than I usually do fine-tuning, adjusting, editing, and polishing the tracks.  Now that I am retired from a day-to-day job that I had I have much more free time to work on music.

The front cover image is four lines of text that read Tom/Furgas/Cruvsa/Dristrop, typed using the "Bookshelf Symbol 7" font in the GIMP program I used to create the covers.

The album is free to be downloaded and burned to CD (which I recommend to make listening more convenient).

Below, stream each track in 192 kbps MP3, and Download WAV files.

listen in streaming audio to 320 kbps MP3

download 196 MB WAV file

This piece was composed and recorded with Mixcraft Pro Studio 6 and mixed down with Mixcraft 7. All sounds are those of sampled, "virtual", instruments.  This piece was created by composing short sections of music of different tempos and time signatures, directly abutted to each other, mixed and matched with no particular organization other than the desire to make the transitions as abrupt as possible. Ken Clinger has likened this piece to a View Master or a slide show, with the individual segments changing unexpectedly. Many segments reoccur, altered or unaltered, as the piece progresses. Generally tonal, but with many atonal elements, again with the emphasis on unexpected changes and shifts of perspective.

"Orchestra Piece 2018" was composed and recorded with Mixcraft Pro Studio 6 and mixed down with Mixcraft 7. It was composed with "virtual" (sampled) instrument sounds, all done on the computer. Scored for flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trumpets, trombones, percussion, and strings. My goal with this piece was to create a work that was as idiomatically "orchestral" as possible using sampled instruments. With sampled instruments it is easy to do a lot of things that a "real" orchestra would never do, and I wanted to avoid that. It required a lot of study and understanding of the way the various sections of the orchestra interact, and kinds of melodic contours and voicings that one hears in orchestral pieces. For example, I avoided "quantizing" the rhythms which would have made them so tight they they'd sound like they were done on a computer.  Some of the entrances of choirs of instruments are staggered slightly, as is usually heard in even the most tightly rehearsed ensembles. The harmonically astringent and rhythmically disjunct sound of my work was inspired by the atonal "classical" music of the post-war period (late 1940's onward).