Monarch
I randomly started making music back in December. At the time, the only place I posted anything was Instagram stories. As short beeps evolved to songs, I built audio.trentwalton.com.
Fast forward to April. When I had 12 songs I was pleased with, I decided to package them up for distribution/streaming. Let this post serve as a mini-release party for Monarch!
Where’d the song/album names come from? The theme for this project was to try and not overthink anything. I’m an amateur here, and while I spend lots of time fussing over details with websites, I didn’t want to do the same with the music.
I rarely edited or revisited songs once they came together, and in Keyser Söze fashion, names came from whatever I saw lying around the office. “Rucco” came from a BOTW Shrine, “Ideals” came from the Ball jar on my desk, and so forth.
The process for the album artwork began with developing a color palette. I assembled some warm tones and played with layer-blending a solid pink/beige block to unify things.
From there, I built some textures by dramatically scaling up image resolution, transferring images to halftone, and then scaling them back down. Gigabytes later, all I had left to do was play with shapes.
I hope you enjoy the beeps. I’ll continue to post MP3s here as they come.