Music for Porn (Volume 01) (Patreon)

I know, I know. You probably saw this come through and were like: what the fuck, Jeremy? Well, if you'll give me a second, I'll explain.

Mild CW for talking about male gay porn in the abstract. 

If you just want the tracks:

MP3:  https://www.mediafire.com/file/hg8rc1ttgsn1qgh/Music_for_Porn_%28Volume_01%29_-_MP3.zip/file
FLAC: http://www.mediafire.com/file/3gyoz7kl8tlknss/Music_for_P%2Arn_%2528Volume_01%2529_-_FLAC.zip/file

I moved to San Francisco in my early 20s, having worked as a bicycle messenger for the last 5 years in Seattle.  I moved with no reason other than the opportunity presented itself and it sounded cool. I knew that, in those years, there was a messenger scene everywhere so I figured I could go down there and make it work.

The messenger scene was a lot different in SF than it was in Seattle, for reasons I don't need to go into. But it wasn't fulfilling anymore, and I spent a lot of time being unhappy and looking for a way out. This was around 2010, btw.

I was working a lot on music whenever I could, pretty obsessively. I was also cruising craigslist for gigs, and friends that knew me sent me gigs they thought might be cool for me to work on. 

One of the gigs that popped up was doing music for an adult film company. I read through what they were looking for and was like, sure, I could do that. I reached out to the company (I don't feel comfortable naming names even after all these years) and they asked me to do some demos for the project they needed music on.

This company was the definition of corporate gay porn. Very little risks, very clean models, and even though they did "fetish" content, it was all pretty squeaky clean and boring. But they had a big project that was a "darker fetish film" (in tone, not really in content), and they wanted some custom tracks for it.

The demos went over well, so I was contracted to do a group of tracks for them. These went over well, and I was contracted to do more down the line. Eventually, after a few projects, I floated to them that if they ever needed extra help in the office with video stuff (I was editing for myself at the time), I could help out. Remember, I was young and desperate to get out of messenger work, and in San Francisco, as a gay kid in the gay scene, working for this company came with a certain cultural cache.

The interview was informal but I do remember one thing very clearly: the senior editor (a straight dude, which was wacky), asked me if I was doing meth. I wasn't, I was just a really nervous kid, but I also knew that was a huge issue in the gay community, and I assume it was also a big issue among the "talent" they hired for their projects.

Long story short, I got the job and worked there for about 5 years before I got absolutely sick of San Francisco and moved to Baltimore.

Since this is only Volume 01 of the library tracks I don't want to give away all the stories about this place, so I'll get to talking about the music: 

The first thing you're gonna notice is that the tracks are LONG (hehe). We're talking 15-25 minutes. I think you can probably guess why: that was the average length of a scene when we edited them. We didn't really like to just loop the same track under the whole thing. So when I made these I would also deliver stems of drums, bass, pads, and leads. That way the editors could mix and match what they needed. These were basically library tracks like what I did for YouTube, but nastier.

I would start with a 5-minute idea, get it approved by the senior editor, and then loop it in Ableton 4 or 5 times. Then I would go through each iteration and start changing out elements for each looped section. That way the theme and feel remained the same throughout, but it didn't strictly repeat.

The result was a music bed that never really repeated exactly the same but definitely kept coming back to the same themes throughout. 

Anyways, that's all the talk about this for this post on the subject. I'll release Volume 02 next month sometime and talk more.

These tracks are too big to attach to Patreon, so here are the links: 

MP3:  https://www.mediafire.com/file/hg8rc1ttgsn1qgh/Music_for_Porn_%28Volume_01%29_-_MP3.zip/file FLAC:  http://www.mediafire.com/file/3gyoz7kl8tlknss/Music_for_P%2Arn_%2528Volume_01%2529_-_FLAC.zip/file