"Swimming in Chaos", by jegasus

*Lore*

Deep down in the dark, dreary and damp underwater world live creatures we could never conceive of, acting in an utterly chaotic and unpredictable manner. It is foretold that merely gazing upon such things is enough to drive people to madness. Thankfully, no one has had the courage to dive deep enough to see what those creatures were up to. And then you came along.

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*Track Description*

This is my submission to M8 Community Jam 06: Underwater! The jam's optional "only samples" challenge proved to be pretty difficult for me since I am not at all used to the sample-based workflow.

My original approach was to create the song itself using mostly synth sounds and then, when I was comfortable with the song's structure, I would swap things out with samples. The problem is that I never really got comfortable with the structure of the song in the first place. But when it came time to swap out the synths with samples, I couldn't really replicate some of the sounds I wanted with samples. So things started to get weird.

That's why my submission is actually a two-for-one deal! The song file and rendered audio contain both versions of my song: the first is the sample-based one, and the second is the mostly synth-based one.

As I often do, I had a really hard time progressing from the basic 8 bar loop I started off with into a fully fleshed out song. So the song is mostly just the same melodic 8 bars playing over and over again with other stuff entering and exiting the mix. To compensate for the repetitiveness, I decided to throw some chaos by adding the accordion and big timpani hits. "Why?" I hear you ask. The answer is simple: For absolutely no good reason. It sounded kind of fun and I just couldn't bring myself to delete it afterwards.

It's also worth mentioning that you will VERY likely recognize the main melodic motif, since it's ripped straight from the Underwater Theme from the NES' Super Mario Bros (   • Super Mario Bros (NES) Music - Underw...  ).

PS: If you're interested, the bundle is available for download on the Dirtywave Discord group.