Goodbye, the nightmare that is Weebly... Well, at least my RonZak website. We have Neocities now, yáll. Anyway, welcome to the revival of RonZak's Contingent Music! What does that even mean? Well, it's just songs that I make "for the hell of it." Not much else to it. If it's a song, an E.P., or an album that I've made "for the hell of it", that I don't feel like putting up on Bandcamp until a later date, you will see it usually here.
It's Christmas today. If you know me, you know I'm not religious, (I'm Atheist,) but that doesn't matter. Michigan has been in a blizzard for a few days. Things are finally slowing down.
Anyway, for Christmas, I got socks, underwear, a 128gb micro SD, a mouse, and most importantly, a red Telecaster with a basic amp. I've been wanting my own electric guitar. My acoustic guitar was actually an acoustic electric, but the cord fell out, and I never got an amplifier, so I never had a use for the electric part, so I took it out. That's why my acoustic guitar has a massive hole on its side. But with my new electric guitar, I made a full length album. I also threw in my acoustic guitar in one of the songs, and my steel drum and kazoo in another, as while as a radio recording, which I believe I used before, but whatever, in a different song. I also sing on three of the songs. Good look transcribing whatever the hell I said in them.
So, something really bad happened to me yesterday whilst wrapping up a session with my bandmate, Wilbur. My electric guitar stopped working. We're hoping it's the input jack that has to be replace, and not the pickups. Input jacks are cheep. Pickups are like two-hundred dollars. I don't want to get a new electric guitar. I just got an electric bass last month. I'm starting to think my pickups when out. We have to check the input jack first before we have a definitive answer.
I know it's been over a year since I did an RZC entry. I guess motivation to keep it up wasn't there. I think a big reason, though, was that I didn't know how make it work. I think I know have the way I'm going to do this. For space purposes, (though I do have fifty gigabytes to work with,) when a new RonZak's Contingent Music Collection release, which I still have to release the second album from back in the Weebly days, (shutter), I will then delete the audio source files, and then link each track entry to the right track page. I feel like that should be sustainable.
Now, regarding this track, this track was made for a stupid, yet entertaining student film. I was one of two sound guys. I tackled most of the soundtrack. Every other song was released from that "film" on "new soundscapes". This was the only song that wasn't. It was just called "Ominous 2", a reference to "Ominous Letter" I think.
Today, WASTED DREAMS brought to my attention that they would like to do a collaboration with Jcran and me. I was asked to make some droney guitar ambience, and so I did, with my bass guitar because as I previously mentioned in the log, my electric's pickups went. I also made two tonally different tracks for the hell of it, knowing they wouldn't be usable for this upcoming project. One's a sonic nightmare, (RZC40,) whilst the other is a bass and vocal track about how today I woke up with it being below zero for both Celsius and Fahrenheit. (-19C and -2 respectively.) (Also, RZC41.)
I'm writing this a year after the fact. I've been really bad at keeping up with this website, and I haven't been doing RZC until recently. (Read: RZC44 A3). This song was made to test out a """"new"""" All-in-One computer my brother gave me. I don't even remember what it sounds like. I also forgot to save it as a .flac, and I refuse to fix that now.
From what I remember, this was on Thanksgiving. I remember I was still on medication after my wisdom teeth removal. The day prior to this, I was feeling completely fine. I went to take the medication I still was on, and, uh... the capsule breach. The taste was the most bitter fucking thing I've ever had the misfortune to taste. I ended up projectile vomiting into the toilet, and it left my throat so hoarse that I couldn't talk right. I was sick for a week from then on, if my memory serves me right.
This album's purpose was to practice using Cardinal, a modular synth program. I did a couple of songs for Airshow with this program. My efforts here ended up feeling like a nervous rave party in space. I wanted to have an ambient song somewhere in here, but that didn't really happen. I wrote my thoughts of each song in their own project files. I will show them here in order of creation.
Watching Black and White Era Drama Shows On a Small Ceiling Television in a Van
At this time I still don't have a name for this album. Recording this song ended up being just under twelve minutes. Channels three and five were constantly messed with whilst recording because I thought they sounded cool as is. Arable surprisingly has a good drum modular, so I should try to use that one more.
Sirius Throws a Party
This one was more rhythm based, I'd say that the previous one I made. Admittedly, I prefer more over this one. This one definitely has the feel of an otherworldly disco track where something has gone horribly wrong.
I'm happy that I'm starting to slowly understand how other patches work. I'm getting the hang of a synth drum patch. The modal synthesizer used in this patch is surprisingly powerful for me.
This whole album (or which I don't have a name for yet) is one I'm doing in a day as practice with Cardinal. I still think that You're Going to Need More Than That to Help You Through from Airshow is currently the best song I made with this program. Hopefully I can top that with a song from this project.
Battle of Egdir Crater
This one was very interesting for me because when I started working on it, I was not liking where it was going. At some point it started to affect me physically. One of the channels was hitting the right frequency to where I could hear a weird feedback with my headphones and my bedroom AC to where it was giving me nausea. It was the closest I came to giving up on this song. I guess a Hail Mary situation happened because when I was able to fix it, it was just uphill from there. With three songs done at this point, what almost became a lost cause became my favorite of this album so far.
The vibe I get from this song is a inter-galactic battle. That perfectly fits with my project, "Lunar Systems Connected".I went to one of my favorite websites, We Made the Stars, to look up names of locations on Callisto, one of the moons part of the story of LSC. Egdir Crater. Egdir is a norse figure that took care of giants. In the lore of LSC, the leaders of Callisto are this oppressive force in the Jovian System, so I felt it was a thematic name to use.
We're Always Lost In Our Own Thoughts
Alright, I definitely should take a break at this point. Anyway, I wanted to go more ambient with this one. It was a bit of a struggle to do so. I really just stumbled into ideas without fully comprehending them. Though it's still has that techno beat, this is so far the most ambient track on this album. I didn't fully succeed with what I wanted to do, but it's good enough.
Reactor Meltdown in Ptolemy Cluster
This song's purpose was for me to practce working with polyrhythms and polymeters. (Last one was probably unintentional.) It's all very rhthmic and chaotic, almost like a reactor having a meltdown, hence the name. And just like a meltdown, things went a little wrong with the recording.
I think some of the synths were clashing with each other when I recorded it. You can hear the recording glitching at points. I kept it in and then had some fun with post-processing. I added reverb in the first third of the song, because it kind of clashed hard during that point. I then had a cool transition idea to where the reverb cuts out and lets the middle show the true colors of the original audio. It acts like a breather from the chaos, before growing to another cresendo, which I left untouched, so you get to hear the weird audio glitches unedited for that part. At the cooldown I brought back the post- processed reverb, (a little different from the first part), faded out the original audio, and faded in the reverbed audio. It made for a really cool and strange outro.
The name is a reference to a star cluster called the Ptolemy Cluster, which itself is a reference to a Greco-Roman astronomer. It's actually a nickname for the cluster. It's other names are Messier 7, M7, and NGC 6475. It also has the Scorpius constellation, which I'm also a Scorpio. Completely coincidental. Also, I don't really much care about astrology. I'm way more into astronomy. To make up the song name, I just looked up star clusters. Ptolemy called to me, so I chose that one.
Despite this song's flaws and errors, I really dig it. This album's not meant to be professional, so I'm not going to care too much about glitchy audio and errors, unless I think it really affects the end product. This album is supposed to be practice, after all.
Breaking Through Every Pantheon
This one turned out really good in my opinion. I did have to restart the record like three times. That wasn't fun. This so ominous and nervous sounding. The synths here give off this vibe of being chased by something. I like how I kept turning on and off channels.
Now, there was one synth I didn't end up using. It was connected to Channel 8. The first couple of times recording, I think it was overbearing my laptop's CPU with all the other channels. Also, in the end, it didn't fit the song, tone-wise. It's too happy sounding compared to the rest of the synths.
I don't know why, but I've been having a space and mythology theme with this project. They make for good names, so I won't complain. After all, those two are interests of mine.
The Page
If you want to hear the weird end product of this project, you can go here.
Sirius Throws a PartyYeah, no, this sucks really badly. I made it as practice using a new DAW, LMMS. It's an open source DAW, and it seems pretty interesting. I think I might come around to really liking it. Unlike this song. (This song is awful, sorry.)
3 March 29: I use LMMS a lot now. I really like it.
When I made this I believe I had gotton through all of Erang's discography. Seeing a video on Dungeon Synth made me want to check out the genre again. I'm thinking of making another moniker to further explore this genre.
This song might sound familiar to you. This is a demo for Things Reveal Themselves To You Over Time. As I was wrapping up Riding Through Anemoia, (the album,) I looked back at this piece and decided it would be cool to expand it into a post-rock electronic piece.
A dumb little song I made with my new MPK Mini Play synthesizer. I know that sounds dismissive, but this synth is fucking killer. It's just that this piece was my first thing recorded for it. It's not bad, but it's also nothing special.
This is a remix of Slip Trip off of We Deserve More Than Now that was made via Mixxx, hence the name. I was trying to decide how I wanted Slip Trip to sound like. I ended up just going with the raw recording instead of this. I don't really like how this version turned out.
This piece was a more energetic number compared to the previous two pieces. It feels bombastic and explosive. Almost hopeful, too?
RZC50 The Prelude Jam Session was made as practice for when I have to do Ambience For April; a sequel project to 2019's November, where I have to make an ambient adjacent song for every day in April. This is definitely not ambient, but it was very fun to do, even if it got me sick because cats go in and out of the garage, (allergies,) and people smoke in the garage. (Disgusting.) But I didn't want to do this in the house because I think I would piss off everyone in there. Because I didn't want to bring my All-in-One out to the garage, I resorted to recording this jam on my field recorder because my laptop's microphone is straight up trash. I did record me doing the jam as a video on my laptop, however, I still can't for the life of me make the footage and the audio sync up. So, I don't know if that video will ever see the light of day. I'll keep it on the shelf for now. Surprisingly, the field recording doesn't sound that bad. It crackles at points, and at parts I thought it was clipping, but I think I did a rough loop at point because the clipping sounded cyclical.
This piece goes through many twists and turns. It ebbs and flows, overwhelming with intensity, and only giving you glimpses of calm reprieves, before throwing you back into its chaotic crescendos. It's like a post-rock album, but it's not post-rock. It's post-electronic, if you will.
Like I did with the Sanctuary in the Smoke mix, this album comes with the raw jam, and the split up parts if you want to listen to certain sections. I thought about taking the route Kayne and I went down on for Voyager II as I Remember 2006, where there's the full, official version, and a segmented version, but it didn't seem practical here. Not to mention the speaking parts that last minutes on their own. Taking the Sanctuary in the Smoke route felt like the best option.
And now for the 30 March 2026 Note: This jam got me really fucking sick. I was hoping I would be okay enough to go to work today. That's not happening. Drainage keeps happening, my throat feels like it's constantly clogging, I'm sneezinng every now and then, my head started pounding an hour ago, and medication is barely working. I forgot I had a home meeting with Health West today, and just standing by the porch door for it, my head was pounding. For the first time I had to call into work. Okay, to be fair, it was the third attempt. The first time I wasn't sure if I could make it through because of some abdominal and nausea issues, but I soldiered on. The second time was some miscommunication about an appointment I had, but I quickly got that squared away. This time I had no choice. I'm a janitor that cleans a airplane parts workshop. I can't go to work like this. I'm hoping I'll be better tomorrow. Better than I how I feel right now, that's for sure. How I like to describe it is being floored.
Ambience For April is still happening, come hell or high water.
31 March 2026 Note: It's fucking Covid. Hatred.
The Prelude Garage JamAn analog electronic (I might be stretching that hard) piece that revolves around a very simple piano motif. I've been waking up at like 6AM lately, and I've been focused on the Ambience For April project, making a song at like 8AM for the past four days, including today. The timing's not by force; it's just what it's been ending up at. This piece is rough around the edges, but it was fun to make. The loops are a bit jagged, and I remember noticing the drum synths were sounding muffled. As a blueprint piece for an album idea, I think it does its job. This piece was also recorded before the piece, 4 April 2026, for AFA.