Cinnamon Pumpkin Zombie Spice

It’s finally October. Down here it’s still too hot, but at least now it’s closer to comfortable. I’m even wearing long sleeves today.

All right, bust out the seasonal stuff, baby, ‘cause it’s fall.

I’ve been making cinnamon hot apple cider on the stove in the evenings. It’s nice to relax with a book, or my Game Boy Advance SP, and have a hot, seasonal libation. I’m pretty much game for all forms of “recreational beverages,” as you know. I haven’t, however, had a single pumpkin spice latte yet. Or spiced ale, for that matter. And I haven’t gotten into the flavored coffee grounds, yet, either. Actually, it’s pretty much just apple cider so far.

Apple cider goooood… long sleeves goooood…

It’s too early to carve pumpkins, but I’m ready. Just waiting.

I expected to be doing well enough to take a week-long (or longer) road trip to Missouri for my sister’s birthday, do some autumnal stuff in St. Louis, and hit KC on the way back. Not gonna happen. I’m stuck in Texas for the time being.

Then there was the fleeting glimpse of a possible rendezvous in New Orleans for Halloween. Some friends from back home were going to take a road trip there, do some awesome stuff, and I was going to meet them. Not gonna happen.

However, it looks like I will, however, at least have something to do for Halloween, as I have been invited to a party of sorts. I don’t think the part is actually on Halloween, so maybe I can still go to 6th Street and blend in with a crowd of zombies on All Hallow’s Eve.

Not to get ahead of myself and skip the whole month, but I would like a word on Halloween itself. Every year, I get the overwhelming motivation to finally work on that “Halloween Music” project, and every year, I burn out or get discouraged because I don’t have the time or the tools to do what I want. Basically, I really, really like the largely electroacoustic score to the computer game Blood, a first-person shooter in which a Prohibition-era minion of a greater demon is betrayed and comes back from the dead for retribution. Yeah, that’s the protagonist. You’re undead, killing other undead (mostly zombies, but you also have banshees, weird gargoyle thingies, and a slew of other Lovecraftian enemies). You start in a graveyard, wielding a pitchfork beneath a claustrophobic, brownish sky, and take an epic journey which leads you to a showdown against a demonic god. I'm actually hazy on the story, but it's a fun, atmospheric, Halloweeny game full of... well, full of blood.

Maybe it’s because I have the full context of the music, but the score to Blood is the closest music has ever come to “scary” for me (which is impossible, really, because nothing is scary). It’s definitely… unsettling. And I want to emulate that. I’ve already done a comprehensive aural analysis of it, outlining the channels I'll need to program and everything.

The game is fairly old, and, as such, the music is somewhat dated as well. Then again, I remind myself, a lot of what academic composers are doing involves synthesizers that sound even more dated. So pretty much, I’m not apologizing for it. And, looking through the library of patches I have, I think I can at least do what I want to do with this. I just wish I had a creepy kids’ choir, because that would be awesome, wouldn’t it?

Unfortunately, there’s no way I’ll get this done this year, either. But it’s fun to come back to.

So yeah, I’m not going to go into a detailed overview of this project, because it’s not going to be done, and I don’t feel like having yet another lengthy blog post about a project I end up abandoning… again. I’m just saying, ‘tis the season for hot apple cider, pumpkin spice, long sleeves, and the walking dead. I’m just heralding the advent of the autumn season, despite canceling two really awesome road trips. I’m stuck here, but at least it’s finally October.