Some Notes About the Electronic Music I've Been Using as Soundtracks in My Videos and Reels

An article written so that I can point to it when explaining about where I found some of the electronic music I use as soundtracks for my promo videos. Along the way, there is some discussion about my personal history with electronic music.

As some readers will be aware, I have been making some short promotional videos (or "reels," to use the social media term) to begin marketing and advertising for my newest online store, Big Shadows. You can check them out on my YouTube channel here. The store is part of a five year plan to develop some at-home income in anticipation of our youngest son, Rowan, graduating from high school and, because of his Down Syndrome and Autism, needing 24/7 care and supervision which will make working out of the home difficult. I'm in the third year of the plan, currently, having figured out a lot of key ingredients thus far. How to make a store, how to make designs to put on products in the store, how to choose products and their manufacturers, and how to operate within an established niche - all of these are fairly sussed out, leading to what many people claim is the most important piece of the puzzle, which is marketing/advertising.

After a lot of thought and research, I came to the conclusion that these promotional videos would be more impactful if they were based on vibes, feelings and entertainment rather than explicitly depicting the products I sell. This point deserves it's own blog post, but suffice to say that there are plenty of online ads out there that show you a succession of products (e.g., designs on shirts), but almost none that evoke an emotion and entertain you for the short period of time available (in a reel, that's a maximum of 90 seconds). Of course, they figured this out a long time ago on TV, but not so much online with social media ads.

Since I'm using generative AI (Midjourney) to produce most of the designs in my stores, it made sense to use generative AI to make the video clips from which these reels are assembled. I've also used stock footage in the Public Domain to make a couple, although they feel less personal. Either way, these videos need music - where to get it?

It just so happens that I have about 3 gigs worth of independent electronic music on my hard drive from around the turn of the century when I used to help out as an admin on the relatively short-lived electronic music hosting/sharing platform, ElectronicScene.com. ES was the idea and passion project of Gideon Marken, a lovely man from San Diego who became disenchanted with Mp3.com and decided to create his own music hosting and sharing site. The site gave independent electronic music producers the ability to create their own artist page and upload tracks to it, a forerunner to sites like SoundCloud and Bandcamp. The goal was to increase listens and exposure, of course, but also to make music available for other projects, a kind of collaborative space. Almost all of the music uploaded to ES was added with the understanding that the tracks could be used in other projects/contexts under an Attribution License - in other words, please feel free to use this music so long as you give me credit for it. I saved quite a bit of that music (2.75 gigs, to be precise), and it's from that pool that I am drawing from today.

So far, I have used music from ES by four different artists: Jason Rubenstein, Fourier Wave Device, Trancenden, and Dr. Heckle and Mr. Jive. While I feel 90% sure that the music in my ElectronicScene folder is fair game from a copyright perspective, I'm not 100% sure, and in any case it's better to have the explicit permission and awareness of the artist in question. Consequently, I do research on these guys to find their web presence today and reach out to them.

It's been over 20 years, so my hit rate is less than perfect. I've talked with Jason and Glenn Watson (FWD) and they have given me the thumbs up - thanks again! I'm in the middle of a conversation with Tal M. Klein (Trancenden), and he has informed me that the rights to much of his catalog were sold, so there might be a problem there. I have been unsuccessful tracking down Dr. Heckle and Mr. Jive., whose track "Nine Below Zero" provides the score for my most recent reel, "Abandoning Winter."I know the artist (Arnar?) is (or was) from Iceland, and have found a couple of articles reviewing the local Icelandic music scene that mention them, but no contact info. Another artist I've unsuccessfully researched is Asoka, whose track "Solitaire Eve" is one I plan to use as soundtrack material very soon. It's a beautiful, sad and haunting conversation between a piano and a stand up bass that burned a hole in my heavy rotation for a few years around 2000 - 2003. I'm not the only big fan of this track; Kahtnipp noted, "This has always been a very special track to me. I found it in like 1998 on Limewire or Napster but could never find any information about the artist. If you happen to know anything about them, please get in touch." I will keep looking.

I got involved with ElectronicScene because of my own personal journey with electronic music. As a much younger man, I dismissed electronic as just clubby techno. That view changed overnight some time in early 1999 when I first listened to the influential big beat classic by the Propellerheads, "Decksanddrumsandrockandroll." It had never occurred to me before that electronic music could be made from samples, and that it could draw from any source. I discovered trip hop, down tempo, illbient, abstract and breakbeat, fell in love, and was immediately motivated to start making my own sample-based electronic music under the artist name, "the Opponent Process."

By the end of 1999 I had started an artist page on Mp3.com and gotten involved in the electronic music section's community. That meant a lot of participation in the various message boards and, eventually, editing/running the official Mp3.com trip hop channel which I called, a little cutely, "Triphopsicle." Inevitably, many of the users of Mp3.com became disaffected and disgruntled with the platform, and during this time I got to know Gideon (aka Sonic Wallpaper) . He had the skills and resources to make his own music hosting/sharing platform, and he did so in, I think, late 2000. A lot of heart and soul went into ElectronicScene.com, with 95% of the work being done by Gideon himself. I helped out with message board moderation, some copy writing, and a few other things, but it was really a one-man show. It was a thoughtfully designed platform that catered to both artists and listeners and enjoyed some success, but in the end the costs in time and money outweighed the site's revenue and it closed after a few good years. (Side Note: I'll get in touch with Gideon and ask him if he wants to add anything here. Stay tuned.)

There are many more potential soundtrack selections in my ElectronicScene folder which I will be using in the upcoming months. That means much more sleuthing and research as I try to find these artists decades later, which is kind of fun. In the meantime, my search for good Public Domain music also continues. Expect a blog post on that topic soon.

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