Many of the songs in Saira have a strange history behind them. I'll try to explain a few here:
* The "Experimental Amateur Radio" station is recorded at a church around 4-5 in the night. It's me on the piano and Simon Jonsson who plays the percussion. The water which you hear in the room is the baptismal font. Having been awake all night we were of course extremely tired and in a really weird mood, but at the same time we were really enjoying it. We put my Zoom H2 in the room, and decided that I should play relaxing stuff on the piano while he'd change rhythm all the time and stop randomly. At 4:45 Simon manages to produce an incredibly strange sound with his drum. At 5:33 you can hear Simon try to hold back his laugh when he realizes how inconsistent his rhythms have been.
* This Song is The Boss is created on my Nintendo DS using Korg DS-10. No post processing or mixing were made. I sometime play this song live at clubs.
* The Intergalactic Express is another DS-10 song, but with some additional stuff created on my computer. This is an Elektrononsens track that me and Yann performed live at various places on his visit here.
* The piano stuff at Nyquist-Meyer and the Universum ending is a real piano (although the universum recording was looped and filtered). When I visited another church in Umeå, I managed to get some time to play the piano with no people around, so I again used the Zoom H2 to record random stuff. This explains the
Stadskyrkan, Umeå credit. I recorded myself playing the massive church organ they have there too, but I have not yet used these recordings for anything. Perhaps in the next game?
* The drums in Haakon, and the Menu music (Elevator Song) are recordings of the built in rhythm box of a 70's electric organ, although some effects were applied on some parts of the Haakon drums. The sound in the menu song before the drums begins is a sound that organ makes when you turn it on (or was it off?).
* The pad sounds in e.g. Bormine as well as several other songs in the game, and even music in other games I have made are pieces I've cut out from my old songs and processed with the software th0nk_0+2 for Mac OS 8. This is a very unknown piece of software that you feed with audio files to produce strange soundscapes. If you google for th0nk_0+2 you will probably only find posts where I write about this software. I still consider it my secret weapon and keep my old iMac only so that I can run it.
* In the Dragon Noir and Mihika music you can Yann playing my harmonium. I love that instrument, and got a really fantastic sounding one for free just by accident around a year ago.
* The Explorer XLII uses tons of samples from
Yann's circuit bent Italean Speak & Spell. Many of the game's devices, and in particular the broken computer at Hoffmann are recordings of this device.
* Yann's dream sequence music have sound effects based on recordings of me and Yann playing an artwork named
Beam Walk by Cristos Gianakos. This artwork have been voted one of Umeå's ugliest pieces of art by the locals.
* Radio Kanar is Yann and his friend Léo Mathieu performing game music on live instruments. Many songs are from my earlier games.
* I couldn't find a good camera sound in my library for Saira, so I went to a photographer's studio and asked if I could record the sound from their cameras - hence the "Sandro, Umeå" credit. The sound is from an 80's Nikon system camera.
* The footstep sounds are Yann's and my feet.