This page is the catalog of my various music projects, spanning from 2012 to the present.
Many of the projects include torrents where you can download the music for free! If you're not familiar with torrenting, you will need a torrent program to download them. I use Transmission, which I like pretty well.
Also please note that while the music is free to download & seed to other torrenters, their other copyrights are still reserved. Please check in with me if you're wanting to use a track/song for something!
solo songwriting projects released under my own name.
a spooky/silly song originally written for a scary stories contest
pop/acoustic/folksy singles + some demos & alternate versions of songs
The first of my 2020 singles! I started making this song up in December of 2019 & recording it soon after. It was supposed to be something of a New Year's song, but production always takes longer than I expect. I had to change the line "even though it's barely January" to "even though it's barely February", but honestly, that's not too bad for how late I usually am on projects.
The songwriting is a little goofy on this, but I had a lot of fun playing with adding extra instruments & vocals to the mix. It was definitely one that I was writing, arranging, and recording all at the same time.
The next of the 2020 singles is a song that I started making up the year before. Since it was close to Valentine's Day at the time, I chose this cheesy, flirty pop song to finish up & record for my second single of the year.
The third of the 2020 singles was actually one that had been floating around in my head for a couple of years already. As you might gather from the first couple of lines, I started writing it when I was 28. In spring of 2020, I was about to turn 30, so I figured I better hurry up & get this one recorded before my birthday hit.
Sometimes I still play this one at shows, but it always feels kinda weird now that I'm a fair bit older than 28. Someday I'll be like 65 singing this song & folks in the audience will be going, "Uhhh..."
I haven't written many political songs. My first album had a few, but afterward I felt like they were too clunky & desolate. Since then I've mostly avoided it, because I couldn't figure out a way to express those feelings in a song without just like raging out. And I'm not quite punk enough of a musician to make raging out work with my sound!
But like many of us, I've been inreasingly tuned in & alarmed about the political, social, & global situation, and in 2021/2022 I had some venting to do, which led to this song. Strangely, I do feel like I was able to find a space here where I could blend the rage into my own musical styles & find a narrative voice that could express my thoughts both lyrically & musically.
I can't actually remember when I made up this song, but I know it was at least a couple years of me just singing it around the house before I did anything with it. In 2022, I rounded up some musician friends & we did a performance of this at the Kansas City Public Library for a Tiny Desk Contest video. It was really fun! This is the demo recording that I sent to the other musicians when we were starting to practice for the video.
This is one of my personal favorites in terms of songwriting. I actually haven't given it a proper production yet--this is just a demo recording I did for a gift CD my mom was wanting to make for my cousins' kids. It's on my list of newer songs that need to be recorded though, so whenever I get around to that project, it should be there. Until then, consider this a little preview!
When I wrote this song, I had gotten it into my head to try out starting each line with the last word/syllable of the previous line. It was almost like a puzzle to write it, but in many ways writing lyrics & poetry is always a bit of a puzzle!
This is a silly song we started playing with Tiny Escalators back in like 2018 or 2019 but never recorded. This demo is another one my mom asked me to record for that gift CD for the niblings. I'm not sure if I will do a full production of this one or not--we'll have to see.
I was working at a thrift store at this time, and one day we had a little Yamaha PSS-470 come in. I bought it up as fast as possible, and it has honestly become my favorite keyboard, even though it is a bit of a toy. (I looked it up on a synth website one time & they described it as one "no serious musician would consider".
After I got it, I was naturally excited to try out my new keyboard, and I spent the weekend recording some keys & a simple beat from my Korg Volca Beats drum machine, and that's how we got this song. Later, I arranged a guitar version for Tiny Escalators to play, so you'll find another version on the 2019 TE album.
"Junco" is a song off of Good Spirits, our 2013 Street Nymphs album. Sometime after that, I was playing around with this Yamaha 4-track tape recorder I have & recorded this. It's a little scrappy, and it sounds like I was maybe recording over something, cause the recording gets wonky in places. But this was also one of my first attempts at doing harmony vocals--something I initially had zero clue how to do & have been working on a lot since then!
electronica & chiptunes composed for daily music challenges
Every now & then I do little challenges to either compose a piece every day or compose a bit of something each day for a certain amount of time. I often can't keep up that pace for long, but it's a good way to get myself making music, and it's nice to have a sort of low-pressure environment where I'm still pushing myself to make (and finish) tracks.
Flyover Indies collab album & fictional video game soundtrack
Rather than our usual Flyover Dailies compilation albums, in 2025 we chose to do more of a collaborative album--a fictional soundtrack for an imaginary horror game, set in an abandoned shopping mall.
As a group, we wrote up lore & story for the game concept, and then we either individually or collaboratively created different tracks for the OST. This was one of my favorite music challenge projects, and I really enjoyed working with other folks & sharing tracks & concepts. I'm also super proud of how it turned out! I spent quite a while afterward making an album booklet, which contains some of our game lore & art we made for the project.
daily video game music composing challenges with the local game dev group
In 2021, my game design group started hosting our own music composing challenges, and I've been participating in those pretty much every time they come around. I missed the one in 2023, because I was trying to do FAWM at the time, but I've got at least a couple of tracks on each of the others. All of my Flyover Dailies tracks except for "Espionage" were made in Pebble. "Espionage" was recorded in Reaper using the Boss DR-670 and Yamaha PSS-470.
This is a list of the tracks that I wrote for the various Flyover Dailies challenges. It's worth checking out the full albums too, though! They're full of a variety of good video game style tracks & are some of my favorite background music for when I'm doing chores & things.
This was actually a combination of 2 different Flyover Dailies challenges, and I only managed 1 track for each of them. The first was a month-long challenge to compose tracks for an imaginary soundtrack, in November 2023. Rather than get a whole soundtrack done, I ended up spending all month working on "Between the Bricks", but I'm fairly proud of how it turned out! I scored it in MuseScore first, and then programmed it into Pebble to render it. It was a fairly slow workflow, but one that worked for me better than just trying to compose directly in Pebble.
Next, we had a Flyover Dailies challenge in 2024, right when I was in the hectic weeks of preparing the local zine festival. I still wanted to participate, though--so I sat down a couple nights & pieced something together with drum machine & keys, adding layers as I went & just recording live. I'm also proud of that one! It's a completely different workflow from the structured composing I did for "Between the Bricks", where instead I was mostly just going by vibes, jamming & workshopping/recording ideas as they came to me.
For this round of dailies, I had been working on a "Pebble Soundpack" & was using this exercise as an opportunity to try out some of the sounds I had been making.
"Bard of the Old Woods" is for the prompt "Leitmotif", and "Hold Up" is for the prompt "Bullet Time". I don't remember the prompt "Faerie Court" went with, but that one is unique in that it uses a just intonation scale that I had been playing with, which has a harmonic minor seventh and other ratios from the harmonic series.
This was the second round of Flyover Dailies--the "Flyover Dailies EP". I think for this one the goal was just to compose every day, not necessarily to make a new track each day. Either way, I certainly did not make new tracks every day!
I wrote "Bee Heist" to fit the "Chase!" prompt, and then "Batigan Theme" was also written to be the intro music for the Flyover Indies podcast that we were starting up at that time. It took on the "A Short Loop" prompt, so the version here has the main loop repeated several times.
For this first Flyover Dailies challenge, I already had the name "Moss Spells" in my head as an album title, and I was trying to theme everything around that, along with keeping up with the daily prompts of the challenge (which I have mostly forgotten now, sorry).
I had also just started experimenting with doing Frequency Modulation (FM) sysnthesis effects in Pebble, but funnily enough, I had the math wrong! So for many of these sounds, I was actually detuning the notes when I added FM effects to the synth. If you notice an eerie dissonance in these tracks, that may be what you're hearing! Not long after this challenge, I realized my error, and have had a lot better luck with FM since then.
I still want to expand on these tracks & do a proper "Moss Spells" album or EP. Who knows when or if I'll get to that, but consider this a demo for it!
daily compositions with random music theory prompts; made in MuseScore
This was just a personal composing challenge, as I was really itching to get back into music theory. I wrote a big list of challenges--stuff like "Common Chord Modulation" and "Use an ABAC Chord Pattern" and whatnot. Then I pulled one at random for each day for the rest of the month.
I also chose to just write sheet music in MuseScore, so I could really focus on the composition, rather than getting caught up in the details of synth sounds or instruments. The tracks in this album are rendered from MuseScore directly, so they have generic MIDI instrument sounds. I've also included PDFs of the sheet music!
As usual, I did not finish the whole month! But I did get a solid week in there.
daily tracks to test out my Synth-Corona music language
In the summer of 2018, I started making Synth-Corona, a code language for creating music & sounds (and the project that would eventually become Pebble). I released the first version that fall & continued adding features & making improvements. In 2019, I decided to do music dailies using Synth-Corona, to push myself to play around with the language more. This was an interesting new challenge, because along with composing every day, I was often running into new bugs & ideas for new features as well!
March 4th 2019 happened to be Tulip Nebula Ball on the Peculiar Holiday Calendar, so I wrote a theme for it on March 3rd.
two weeks of dailies using FamiTracker, Renoise, or keyboards
2018 was when I first started getting involved with Flyover Indies, and at the time several of the video game music folks were doing this online music dailies challenge. I didn't participate in any of those, but it got me wanting to try out music dailies again, and soon I decided to give it a go. This was one of the rare times I made it longer than a week on a dailies challenge, too!
The Flyover Indies folks had also just introduced me to FamiTracker, a free program for composing NES & SNES compatible chiptunes. My first week was a mix of FamiTracker & other workflows.
For the second week, I went a little more structured. I used FamiTracker for everything this time, and I challenged myself to compose for different settings each day, rolling dice to generate random environments using two adjectives & an environment type. I've listed the prompts I ended up with on the track list below!
my original stint of daily tunes; made in LMMS
These are some of my first attempts at making video game music! I had been composing for a couple of years at this point & was starting to get interested in game design as well. I didn't quite know how to go about making video games yet, so I would just imagine different settings & scenarios & try to compose something for them.
"Ferry In The Fog" was a bit of a skip day, so that one actually uses a funky piano piece I had scored earlier, and I just rendered it in that bit-crushed piano sound. "Feb27-2012" and "Mar12-2012-Mazurka" are both based on prompts submitted to me through Tumblr, although I can't remember what the prompts were exactly.
"Ferry in the Fog (Samplepella Version) is not actually related to TenEleven at all. It was a later rendering, but I threw it in here as a bonus & I hope you will enjoy it!
tiny folk trio - my band from 2014-2019
Nash High, Melinda Lavenau, Mark Coulter
our biggest & most polished album
This is the definitive Tiny Escalators album. It has pretty much all of our original tracks, and it really shows the growth we'd made since forming the band 5 years earlier. In my mind, it's actually a set of four EP's, one for each season, and the lyrics booklet is broken up as such.
We spent much of the year in 2019 recording this album. I had converted one of the bedrooms in my house into a studio & we had a number of recording sessions, recording individual parts for a handful of songs at a time. I remember I had this big spreadsheet going to track our progress, and it was exciting to see it slowly fill up.
After the main band parts were all finished, I spent some time going back in & adding additional parts as well--some keys, bass, and extra melodies with the Yamaha PSS-470, some accordion, ukulele, and even some bodhran. It's still my biggest endeavour as far as music productions & albums go, and it's one I still love a lot. We don't play as Tiny Escalators anymore, so I'm really glad to have these recordings to listen back & remember the fun we had as a band.
This was our first go at a Tiny Escalators album. I didn't have quite the recording setup at the time, and I was getting ready to move to Kansas City & didn't have quite the space for doing a more polished part-by-part recording. So we improvised, and I put together a 6-track (2 on the computer & 4 on a 4-track field recorder) live-session recording setup in my little apartment at the time. Then we basically just recorded one of our typical band practices.
We also had previously recorded 3 of our early songs, so I included them in the album. "We As All Things Grow" is the only one that isn't included on the 2019 Tiny Escalators album, specifically because when I relistened to that early recording of it, I didn't think there was anything I wanted to do differently about it in 2019.
hushed, mellow tape demos for early Tiny Escalators songs
These are the tape demos that eventually led to Tiny Escalators. Coming out of the big Street Nymphs album in 2013, I had been playing with a quieter, softer sound & had a few songs in this style. I met Melinda at around this time, and I pitched these demos to her & Mark (who also did drums for the Street Nymphs album) to see if they would like to join up to flesh them out.
I recorded these on a 4-track tape deck in my folks' basement, just kind of playing around. I would just sit down on the floor and set the microphone in my lap--recording guitar first with my sister's old student guitar, then vocals, and then just adding whatever else--extra guitar parts, layers, knee pats. At one point if you listen closely you can hear my family's old cat purring at the end of a track.
I've also added in another version of "We, as All Things, Grow" that wasn't in the original demos. This is the first version--recorded with a very old mp3 player on the back deck at my folks' house, in the summer. It was kind of late, so I was singing quietly to not disturb anyone, but then I really liked how that sounded, which kind of influenced that shift toward a more hushed sound.
soundtrack composing, procedural music projects, and misc compositions
I started getting interested in composing back in high school, when I discovered Finale Notepad. I didn't know anything about music at the time, but I loved messing around with that! In college, I started playing around on the piano & keyboards, and I took music theory classes, which I found super interesting. I really enjoy both the mathematical/theory side of music writing, and the looser, more intuitive approach of just playing around & finding whatever sound feels right.
Along with being nerdy about music theory, I've also been interested in procedural music & creating funky music computer programs. In 2020 I had two dynamic/procedural music soundtrack projects--one of them was adding music to my own game, Transmutations, and the other was for my friend Charlotte's game Tracer. Both of those use music theory & code to interpret game events into the music that gets played.
various compositions & musical experiments
This is a collection of some random pieces I've written or performed. Some of them are for actual soundtrack projects, and some are just random instrumental tracks. A couple are improvised.
Wandered Off was a Bitsy Jam game I made in 2017. The game jam ran for a week or two, and I had the goal of making my game & a full soundtrack to go with it. The game itself ended up taking me 6 months, and I only ever finished 2 tracks for the soundtrack!
This is the track for the Office stage, the first level of the game, before your character gets transported to the dream world.
This track is for the 2nd stage of the game, a puzzling & mazelike arrangement of Corridors that connect the protagonist's daydreams to the rest of the dreamworld.
My friend Johanna & I did a Ludum Dare game jam one time & made Dusk Strider, a platformer where you play as a robot/angel who has to paint their own platforms as they go. This is the only soundtrack piece for it, a short jam written in Synth-Corona.
The only actually pre-composed track in the Tracer OST is the Menu Theme, which I wrote in Synth-Corona, using the same sounds that appear in the in-game dynamic music engine.
Before we decided to do fully dynamic music in Tracer, I created some demo tracks to try and feel out the sound. This first one I was mostly just riffing around with the Yamaha PSS-470 & Boss DR-670.
For this second Tracer demo, I was going for a soaring, fast feeling. Charlotte had already started splitting each stage into 3 sections, with each getting slightly more difficult, so I had the track ramp up similarly. Shortly after this we decided to try and sync the BPM of the music to the actual pace of the game, and since the player can potentially speed up or slow down, that's when I decided it would be best to just make a built-in music system that actually uses the game's pace as its tempo.
This is a short piece inspired by a neat-looking sunbeam that was reflected onto my ceiling one day. I took a photo of it, and then tried to translate the different spots & blobs into a musical score. I've included the photo in the download folder, in case you want to compare them.
This is a synthy piece I wrote & recorded on to the Yamaha PSS-470 sometime around when I released the Bran EP. I don't know if I had any larger project in mind for this one, or if I was just making it for fun one day.
This is a short piece I wrote to toy with the idea of using a 31/8 time signature--basically 4 measures of 8/8 with one teensy little eighth note shaved off the end of the last one.
I think the whole piece is only 2 or 3 rounds of this, but you might notice a little jump whenever the measures shift--that's that missing eighth note.
This piece came out of a music theory class where my professor mentioned something about... some kind of chord substitution I think, and he said something to the effect of, "But I don't know why you'd ever want to do that." So I decided to do that.
I don't remember exactly what the goal was, but I know it involved sort of modulating all the way through the circle of fifths & using an enharmonic substitution to switch back into the original key.
At some point I got curious about 13/8 time, and I wanted to try a version of that where the measure is broken into a set of 3 eighth notes, a dotted eighth, and then two more eighth notes. I played around with a fingerpicking pattern for it on guitar, then added a little lead melody, and this is what we got!
This is sort of an odd one. In 2012, my big music code project was the VMG, a procedural music program that would create randomly-generated MIDI files. I coded some music theory into it & came up with some ways to generate & reuse patterns for rhythm & melodies.
For this track, I wanted to try a sort of hybrid computer/human approach. I had the VMG generate a melody by itself, and then I imported that into MuseScore & wrote piano accompaniment for it.
A lot of the VMG tracks sound very random & lack cohesion, so the challenge here was to get the piano part to create some context & direction for an otherwise wandery, aimless melody. It was a fun challenge, at least!
This is a beat & keys improv piece, recorded some winter around 2012. All I remember is that it was night time & it had been snowing & I was looking out the window. Everything was covered in snow & lit by the street lamps & porch lights & it was just very mellow & beautiful.
The beat was probably composed in LMMS & running off my laptop. The keys are probably the old Yamaha keyboard I had growing up (I didn't have the PSS-470 yet). I recorded it all onto a tape deck, and that swelling static is likely a product of the deck's Dolby noise removal system reacting to the heavy beats of the kick drum.
Recorded not too long after Snow Hills, this is another beat & keys improv piece. Same setup--LMMS beat & Yamaha keyboard, recorded to the tape deck. I don't remember the scene for this one quite as well as I do for Snow Hills, but based on the title I'm assuming it was recorded on a cold Saturday morning.
dynamic music system / soundtrack for Tracer by Espion games
In 2020 my friend Charlotte was expanding one of her game jam games, Tracer, an arcade racer where you fly a spaceship through an endless, neon tunnel and dodge various obstacles. I offered to do music for it, and we ended up creating a pretty extensive dynamic music system, where most of the soundtrack is generated based off of the randomized obstacles that appear in the tunnel.
I love procedural music (NOT AI music--procedural! Where you write a program or make up rules to create music from.), so it was a blast to make, but one result is there's no soundtrack album for me to share. If you want to listen to the OST, you'll have to play the game!
Each stage of the game has a 'core' track--generally bass & drums--that is a pre-composed pattern, with some room for random variations. This loops in the background, controlled by the speed at which the player is flying. Then, each obstacle is mapped to a different set of sounds, and each obstacle position is mapped to a different note or phrase of notes. So as you pass an obstacle, it will trigger an instrument, and together they'll form the music for that stage!
dynamic music system for Transmutations by me
Transmutations is a little puzzle game based on cellular automata that I made in 2018-2019. For its 1-year anniversary, I decided to add procedural music to it. Since the game happened to be played on a 5x5 grid, I realized that could work as a music sequencer if we looked at the grid as 3 squares--the center square, the 8-tile square around that, and then the 16-tile square around that. That made it easy to have the outer square be 16th notes & the middle square 8th notes, and I decided to make the middle square be quarter notes & just repeat itself 4 times per measure. Then I just assigned different sounds to the different types of tiles and had them randomly select notes to play whenever they get triggered. It's pretty simple, but it added a lot to the game!
chiptune & synthy tracks/experiments/tests made in Pebble or Synth-Corona
These are several collections of music I've made in Pebble or Synth-Corona over the years. Many of these pieces are short tests, jams, and experiments. I've organized them into a couple of EP's based on what I was doing at the time. You can also find a good deal of Pebble music under the Composing Dailies project, because I often would use it for dailies as well!
February Album-Writing Month (FAWM) is an annual songwriting challenge to create 14 tracks in February. I've been interested in it for a couple of years, and in 2023 I tried to go for it. I had been playing around with some experimental tuning systems, and I tried to use the challenge as an opportunity to actually make some tracks with those scales. I hit a brick wall, though, and I only completed two tracks for the challenge.
Toadstool Symphony uses a scale with only 3 notes (which is honestly too few!!), but they are all fairly harmonic with each other. Chicory Jam is starting to flirt with some of the more dissonant sounds in these funky scales. Someday I'll have to come back to this concept & make a proper album or EP of funky tuning tracks.
Another music experiment--these are tracks that are built around rhythmic patterns derived from interlocking all the different factors of a given number. I actually wrote a Python script that would generate the patterns & create the code needed to sequence them in Pebble.
The main goal of rewriting Synth-Corona as Pebble was to get it to run fast enough for live playback. That opened the door to live-coding jams, where you loop the track & make changes to the next loop as it plays. These are tracks I set up with the intention of jamming with them.
Throughout the course of working on Pebble & Synth-Corona, I made a lot of tracks just to test out different features or issues. So I ended up with quite a few short tracks like these, often with some inscrutable filename.
Here we have the very earliest Synth-Corona tracks, dredged up from a long buried folder that was literally called 'old' (and containing a subfolder called 'older').
moody synth pop
This is an EP I made in 2016, experimenting with some solo music-making after releasing the first Tiny Escalators album. At the time I wanted to come up with a moniker for my solo stuff, but I've since decided to just release under my own name, so this will probably be the only Bran release.
improvised keys sessions; synthesizer windchimes
In fall of 2014, I did 4 different improv sessions on synth keys, each about 10-15 minutes. I would set up a synth sound--generally with a lot of delay & such, and then just play for a bit, record it, then go back & break it up into a few different tracks.
Parabola Bells contains two different sessions--Side A (which I left as one track, and Side B. They both had a similar vibe, so I kept them together.
improvised albums recorded to give as holiday gifts
a continuation of the Snowplains theme, this time with digital recording, drum machine, & layers
a two-sided tape's worth of wintery improv, plus a couple of non-improv songs
early releases; scroungy folk rock + electronic pop
Nash High, Mark Coulter
a silly, and yet melodramatic, electronica EP
my very first album! not available anymore