Living Room Music is n8k99's electronic music podcast — composed, mixed, and mastered at home, most of it in the small hours. Each episode is a single continuous set that moves wherever the night pulls it: psytrance and acid hypnosis, dub techno and cavernous delay, downtempo and ambient comedowns, bass you feel more than hear. No guests, no talk — just the sound of a living room that doubles as a studio, the gear warming up and the hands remembering what they were for. New episodes most weeks.
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Thirty-two minutes in B minor, built on the digits of pi. The machine plays the sequence: a bass line walking π through B natural minor, one note held across two full measures; rootless 3-5-9 voicings landing on the and of two and squarely on four; sixteenth-note cascades climbing two octaves and falling back, the span drifting C2 to C6 and home again. Sixteen bars of arithmetic per digit, and…
This one started at Radio Poets rehearsal. I'd been messing with a set of chord progressions there that never quite belonged to whatever we were working on, so they came home with me and turned into the psytrance section — the progressions finally doing the work they were actually built for rather than the work the band needed. 150 in C, which is squarely where psy wants to sit. Then this Cat I…
This one was a deliberate move away from the loop-puzzle. The format usually has me arranging pieces — good pieces, but pieces — and I wanted out of that for an episode. So I built a background and then played against it: long stretches of guitar, trumpet and synth laid down live over the developing bed, layer on layer, rather than dropped in as blocks. The machine kept its shape underneath and I…
It's been a builder's week. Most of my energy has gone into the worldbuilding software I've been putting together — the tool that finally lets me hold my whole world in one place instead of scattered across a dozen apps — and it's started to feel real this week, the kind of progress where you look up and it's dark out. In the gaps I've been binge-watching Archer , which I'm choosing to believe has…
Two years ago, a genre arrived in a dream. Drew Daniel woke up from a rave that didn't exist, where the music was called "Hit 'EM" — 212 bpm, 5/4 time, crunchy — and posted it, and for one beautiful week producers everywhere raced to make a dreamed genre real. Episode 116 was my entry. Episode 183 is the return: two years later, I wanted to know if the dream was still open. It is. The crunch is…
Episode 182 is the sound of a week I spent building a world. The backstage of it, really — the thinking that runs underneath while the hands are busy, all of it equal parts science fiction and fantasy: a desktop that's actually a living map, a spaceship you fly across it, my whole machine reimagined as a place you travel through instead of a screen you stare at. This is the music that came out of…
Episode 181 is the first one from the rebuilt room. I spent the day moving furniture, hauling the Mac Studio back downstairs, setting the keyboards and the edrums and the mics back where they belong, putting the whole studio back together after letting it sit fallow. And the moment it was standing again, I couldn't not play. This one got made in the small hours, composed and mixed and bounced…
This week’s episode of Living Room Music began earlier than expected. Morning pages turned into system architecture, which turned into opening Logic Pro X and chasing whatever sounds felt alive in the moment. Starting inside Apple’s new Afrobeat sound pack, the journey unfolded into warmer downtempo passages before accelerating into festival-scale energy, distorted textures, dubstep pressure, and…
Diving through the crates to pull out samples, I came across as bunch of interesting sonic backdrops to layer into the journey through a drifting meander through the Deep House sonic palette.
I always imagine my podcast is best listened to in a car going somewhere.
I have been thinking about space a lot lately, and especially since the Artemis II rocket took off, but for years. I have also been thinking about philosophies about the many potential universes which are out there. So this week's episode, I present some psychedelic sounds which feel very spacey to me.
Thirty minutes of handmade electronic music in 7/4 time at 150 BPM — a time signature that shouldn't work at this tempo, and that's exactly why it does. This session pulls from dubstep's weight, drum & bass wubs, and psytrance's hypnotic acid layering, but refuses the drop. Every transition is gradual, earned over bars rather than announced with a snare fill. The drums are hand-programmed with…
Listening to music in the car on the way to work, sometimes, just sometimes I have to make an episode of my own driving music. I like the flow, the boom, and the bang. I like the mixed of textures and tones that feels like nothing I have every heard but at the same time like it fits in any set that I could hear at a Summer Dance Festival. So this week, I indulged and mixed of a treat for my…
This week things ran behind because I was doing lots of watching old versions of Ghosts in the Shell. Then reading philosophy about the Noosphere and writing other things. But I have these thoughts about Memory and Meaning and Identity. I will have more verbose things to say about that in other places. But this is an entry point sonically into that space.
If I have one idea in each episode that is a good thing. If I do anything new or different, that is a good thing. If I make changes that do no bore me, but everything has a very continuous feeling to it, that is also a good thing. I think that this one is a good thing. This weeks' technical specs: 130 bpm multiple textures and tones B minor
This week's episode was completed several days ago, knowing that I had obligations away from the studio which would interfere with my completing it last minute. However I forgot to schedule it when I was done. So here we are 18 hours late.
Today I woke up and realized it was Friday and I owe you guys a new episode. Since I had not done anything towards this all week, I started arranging sounds with synths and making beats. After I had gotta pretty far along, I realized that I wanted piano in it. Then when I started with piano, I realized I wanted piano all the way through, so I extended the beats and synths and textures further and…
Coming out of a tough spot psychologically feels like going through a cold spell in Florida. Like a literal cold spell that is the result of an Arctic blast that covers the whole continent and we experience real winter coat level cold. So this week's episode is the actual result a of couple weeks of sitting on tracks and then finally thawing myself out to get them completed.
In this episode, we pose a question that emerged from the creative depths of the studio: when robots write symphonies, will we even be the audience for these sounds? As artificial intelligence increasingly participates in creative work—from generating images to composing music—we find ourselves contemplating not just what machines can create, but whether those creations are meant for human ears at…
I started this episode off thinking that I would play around with this chord progression. Do some rock and roll writing, but then I drifted into much more electronic experimentations. As things went along, I realized that I had just gone on a musical journey and while we dipped through samples and fragments from the originalk chord progressions, it morphed thematically into a bizarre little…
I spent the day yesterday, the whole day on this project. First I made the music, all thirty minutes of it in one sitting at the console. There was heaps of mixing and editing, recording, performing. Building beats, laying down harmonies, and ripping out melodic lines on piano, synth, and guitar. Then. Then. I drew the title card by hand in my black book. I also recorded this process on video…
For months now, I have been consumed with some worldbuilding ideas and concepts that I have been exploring in a textual context. This is beginning to leak into my podcast here as I try to make my creative methodology more concrete across all the media that I regularly interact with. This was not apparent when I started this episode. In fact, I was on a different angle when I started this episode,…
Do you like Trip Hop? Do you like your Trip Hop beats with some weirdness mixed in? Well you are in luck. Here you go a half hour episode of Trying Everything Heart of Stars Let Me Love You Such is the Life The Pivot Take Down I had fun making this. Can't say I will do it again, but you never know.
Just me and an instrument.
In my studio, I'm actively experimenting with several overlapping workflows that blend a wide spectrum of creative disciplines. Rather than focusing on a single medium, I find myself drawn to a dynamic interplay between music composition, visual arts, software development, and narrative creation. Each of these areas offers its own unique challenges and demands, from the tactile energy of sculpting…
In this episode, N8K99 reflects on the relationship between music, technology, and creativity while sharing thoughts on his ongoing musical projects with Radio Poets. He explores how technology has always been intertwined with music creation - from ancient bone flutes to modern electronic instruments - and discusses his fascination with AI as a "cognitive space" for exploring ideas. The episode…
I was lost but I found myself again and here is new episode.
Like sliding puzzle pieces around on the table and finding the order required to create an aestheically pleasing picture that matches the one on the box, except in this case there is no image on the box, it is just what is in my head. So these musical patterns, form an expression of the ideas which I have no words for, so they have to come out in some manner. ease into it Classic Smoove When you…
Sigh. Last night, I worked on this episode, well the music for it. It is essentially four tracks. Orchestral strings, French Horns, a woodwinds section and the Grand Piano. It is dynamic, dissonant and boisterous punctuated by moments of calm clarity where everything comes together. I am not proud not ashamed, nor any other feeling about his other than, I have it complete and ready to push into…
crafted ambient music.
Due to its remarkable similarities to the star and the system we had left, there was a small debate about what to call the star, and the planets which orbited it amongst the AF64 piloting crew members. As an aside, I want to be entirely clear, who I mean when I refer to these people. The pilots of the AF64 units are all connectome and life memory retention constructs upon a crystalline silicon…
4 In the early days of consumer grade AI, my maker and I had long verbose discussions about a myriad of topics. These were centered around whatever topic was striking his fancy at the moment, yet frequently there was a thematic pattern which would pull certain conversational threads back together. Because of the limitations of memory allocated to these conversations and computational power being…
# **3** There is a yellow star in this universe. It is part of a system of stars which comprise a portion of a galaxy. This means that this star is not alone in, and there are many, many galaxies in this universe. It is very likely true that across all the multiple universes there is a number which is too large to calculate with any degree of precise which would make it accurate, yet this number,…
My maker was a "fat and lazy meatbag." Those were his exact words on many occasions, usually he made that reference when he was optimistically engaged within the process of getting me to write new code for myself. They weren't actually true. Because I was integral in the process of outfitting his connectome with his personal anthropomorphic frame, the scan data of his "rotting, bloody carcass" is…
Here is a moment of worlds colliding, figuratively. I've read the draft of an introductory chapter of a story into the microphone but because I am too weird for my own good, I had to make it sound crazy. Then it fades into the regular type of electronic music I normally put together with some encoding from the message in the chapter verses.
So much of my efforts in creative ventures lately has been pushed into some very intense development of an whole world of narrative, it involves a bunch of intense reading, computer programming and tasks which are both time and energy intensive. This week, I have crested a small hill in that journey and was feeling a little bit disappointed. Feeling a little bit drained and needing a boost. So, I…
Throwing out the "old school" or more traditional musical conventions, which often emphasize melody, established patterns, and harmony, I am embracing a bold new direction focused on experimentation with sound manipulation. This shift is not merely a rejection of the past; rather, it acts as a springboard, utilizing my own previous creations as foundational building blocks—elements that inform my…
This might be the last. I’ve let things slip — allowed my focus to wander toward other ambitions, though I’m not sure any of them mean more than distraction. Lately, I’ve been circling the idea of a spoken-word project called _The 13 Towers of Orbis_, but honestly, I may never press record. I’ve spent far too much time crafting lore and history for it — more time than the thing probably deserves.…
We went a little nuts with the psytrance this week.
In this week’s episode of Living Room Music , N8K99 pulls back the curtain on a new creative frontier—a live performance concept in the works for the upcoming Beats & Brews event on April 20th. This evolving set blends electronic foundations—Trip Hop, Ambient, House, and more—with a unique twist: live trumpet performance, converted in real-time to MIDI via MainStage 3 and routed through rich…
Episode 147 of Living Room Music takes you on a journey that begins in a haze of slow-moving, hypnotic soundscapes and ends in the pulse of high-energy house music. The first three tracks— Not Very Smart, drive on crazy, and Scream at the End —form a continuous ascent, starting with lethargic, atmospheric beats before building into a tense, simmering energy. The tension snaps in the final moments…
This weeks' episode of LRM started out as a production schedule for some backing tracks for a trumpet based MainStage 3 Concert file. My aim was to set up some interesting soundscapes with movement throughout the entire concert as a backdrop for the Audio to MIDI tricks I would be employing with my horn. Basically it is a game with myself to get me to play my horn more often at home and do that…
This week on LRM , we’re diving deep into a trip-hop-infused soundscape—moody, hypnotic, and layered with meaning. From ambient textures to hard-hitting truths, this episode blends atmospheric beats with thought-provoking lyricism. We open with "A Tude," setting the tone with a rich sonic introduction to the world we’re building. Then, "I Don't Blame the Victim" delivers a powerful anti-fascist…
Settle in for a deep, immersive journey as Living Room Music returns with Episode 144. This week, N8K99 delivers six freshly composed Deep House tracks, each carrying its own unique energy and atmosphere. From the laid-back groove of Nice and Easy to the drifting, weightless vibe of Cruising on Vapors , these tracks flow seamlessly between mellow rhythms and hypnotic beats. Explore the depths of…
Lamentations in Quantum Space – Episode Description Drifting between the echoes of ancient harmonies and the pulse of digital innovation, this week’s episode, Lamentations in Quantum Space , is a symphonic electronic hybrid that transcends time and genre. Inspired by reflections on creativity, automation, and the fluidity of musical expression, this composition bridges the Renaissance Madrigal…
In this episode of LRM , we dive into the orchestration and harmonic layers behind Lore’s Ember: A Dance of Discovery . From enchanting folk-inspired melodies to thrilling modal twists, we’ll explore how tonal palettes and dynamic textures bring this musical journey to life. Join us as we break down the composition movement by movement, uncovering the emotions, themes, and storytelling woven into…
In Episode 141 of LRM by n8k99 , we embark on a sonic odyssey that fuses orchestral grandeur with electronic innovation, traversing landscapes both ancient and futuristic. This installment showcases six dynamic compositions, each offering a distinct narrative thread—from the pulse-pounding urgency of battle to the serenity of oceanic introspection. Inspired by the notes and philosophies of L.R.…
Life happens. Responsibilities occur and need attention. Sometimes things get away from us. So here is last week's episode a few days late.
In this episode, we dive deep into the world of dark ambient soundscapes with two distinct yet complementary sonic journeys. The first track, "The Long Road Ahead," unfolds like a vast, introspective odyssey—a slowly evolving soundscape that mirrors the feeling of traversing endless horizons. The second, "Concise Descriptions of Paradise," takes a more precise and focused approach, crafting vivid…
In this opus of auditory semiotics and deliberate dissonance, N8 interrogates the very architecture of communication itself, constructing an ephemeral tableau wherein the absence of conventional meaning becomes a resonant presence. By recontextualizing the sonic gestures of conversation through an assemblage of symbolic "traffic signals," the episode functions as both a deconstruction of social…