As I went about my days after a brief visit to Japan with my father, I had lost the only friend outside the family I had. I was alone. In my time by myself I produced a great deal of music, but it didn’t get much of a response. I was used to spurning the world, making music that I believed would one day find the right ears but whose time had not yet come. In life, I was by myself. On the Internet, I was drowned out by a sea of voices who shouted louder than me, played the game better than me, and just simply did more to appeal to others.

I don’t know if what I created in those days will ever truly find an audience. I had worked with a primitive form of music: three channels of square wave, sounding much like old video game consoles made by Nintendo (with some key differences; to the initiated its a bit different than what any Nintendo system had, but for regular folks it will immediately conjure images of Nintendo). I limited myself to three channels with a waveform that goes from one extreme to another mathematically.

Indeed, a wave that goes from +1 to 0 and back evenly is the ideal square wave. It is a sound that is not heard in nature, but it is the basis of binary ideas such as on/off, yes/no, up/down. These are human analyses of nature. While being inhuman in some sense, it is in another sense the most human of all sounds, being the basis of knowledge.

But these are dualistic representations of things; we think in extremes at the very core, we want a yes or a no and a square wave gives it to us, just as a computer does: its bits are connected either to a voltage source or ground, and as such it is the most extreme example of what sets us apart from the rest of nature with our dualistic thought. It’s logical. A square wave is the sound of merciless, unremitting logic.

I used only this sound for this reason; I wanted to make the sound of the future, even as it went back to the roots of digital sound. My chiptunes were not for pleasure, as many were. They had a purpose, an agenda, a will to digitize the self and to explode through the cosmos in a singularity. To that end I explored many types of music: classical, atonal, weird scales, octatonic scales, strange time signatures, changing time signatures. All of it seemed to be digital representations of aspects of nature, flowing through our computers, out of our speakers and into our ears.

It was beauty, but few enjoyed it. I got mostly criticism and a rather lukewarm response. I had something to say but no one was hearing it. It could be that I wasn’t a very good artist; I didn’t communicate well, I was too esoteric, my ideas were too obscured, not put out into the open and explained. The music was just there, presented almost like a troll. I wanted to create a digital singularity with music, but it wasn’t what people wanted. People wanted to enjoy life, spend the time they had on this Earth pursuing various endeavors, having careers, children, various things to occupy themselves with.

Why did I want to create something that didn’t fit into this picture? Well, I guess I just wanted to be important. I wanted immortality, to create something that someone could dig through the morass of the Internet and then say “Aha, here is something interesting, something that has something to say about the universe through music.” This is vanity, of course, but I can be quite vain I suppose, as many artists are. I suppose I needed to be something in my mind through art because in my mind I was nothing, just a crazy guy with no friends or job. I was 0 and I needed to jump to +1 through art; it was essential to my psychological well-being.

Did it help? On a psychological level, yes. It set the groundwork for continuing my path through life. I made some friends (and later lost them), but I always would have art, and when I look at the vast amount of things I have created, it takes me from zero to one.