{ memoirs } echoes

once upon a time, i stumbled upon the term “apex“.
it was a few months before moving to Paris.
truly, that was one Hell of a creative time…
i needed to create things, even small things, experiment ways to get them out of my mind, by whatever means i could.
i was playing with the word apex and i thought of an acronym and that’s how one of my many small projects got its name.
a small project that first began like many: for fun.

on some cloudy day of winter 2001, a couple of months before moving to Paris, a good friend introduced me to a pretty basic sample software.
i began baby-stepping through it, with samples & loops. but soon, like everything i did, i needed the canvas to be organic, made from some kind of flesh & bones stuff.
i knew what kind of things i wanted to create: instrumental and dark.
what i craved were sounds that weren’t usually heard in a melodic way, sounds that’d be both odd and familiar at the same time.
i searched online for some wind wav files, and that’s when i stumbled upon a medical sounds database of myocardial and pulmonary diseases.
that was it !

crafting things with that audio material, both raw and somehow strangely poetic, was the beginning of the “a.p.ex.” project, and gave birth to a small ep, never to be released.
i became very enthusiastic creating these small pieces, it seemed to fall in all the right places at that time.
nevertheless, i was shy to let my friends listen to those hectic experimental short tracks, even though most of them weren’t judgemental and knew i had fantasized for years about creating my own music label.
some friends told me i should follow through, even my partner in crime at the time told me i should just go for it, start a label and be more consistent with music and stuff, and we knew a lot of people that worked in the independent music scene at that time, that could have helped.

but for me, the a.p.ex. project was for fun, for my own self-centered world, and i knew i wasn’t that good at making music, anyways.
it seemed i had been far more gifted with helping others do their own marketing, or at making graphic stuff like band logos, flyers and posters.
besides, nothing i had done was made to be released in the first place, i just wanted to experiment a new medium, and see what could go from there, while the main goal remained the same : having fun through the process of creating something.
though a.p.ex never made it through the online scene, some tracks were embedded for a limited time on my parano profile.
just a few months before i left Paris for good, the one friend that introduced me to the sample software, insisted on remixing one of my small track. this remix was allegedly played, one winter night, at some small underground hard-tek party he was attending.
after leaving Paris, the a.p.ex. project went back to my many unfinished dilettante creative attempts.

the acronym “a.p.ex.” stands for “a perfid existence
(at first it was “alice perfid existence”, because one of my many nicknames used to be ‘alice.d‘. but i finally gave this name to a now lost track).
of the 10 tracks i had made then, only 6 survived.
(it seems like i have a tendency of throwing everything away, from time to time, part of my tabula rasa way of life).

though i keep listening to those small surviving bits through the years, i’m not 100% ok with them. only 2 still have my favors.
this is one of them.
most of the beats are sounds from myocardial diseases, distorted and reworked to sound like usual electronic beats. the voice sample was taken from a site that used to have lots of slutty phrases taken from movies (mostly p0rn) but that were easily downloadable wav format files.

maybe one day i’ll exhume the a.p.ex. project…
after all, 18 yrs have passed since the making of the first track.
seems like a reasonable time for a come-back.



a.p.ex – “i won’t bite you” (2001)

[sc_embed_player fileurl=”https://thebloodshotlegacy.net/apocalypsep/blog/echoes/a.p.ex-iwontbiteyou_functional_edit.mp3″]

a.p.ex

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