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Sunday, November 18, 2018

Todd Rundgren - No World Order CD-Rom


No World Order CD-ROM by TR-i (or Todd Rundgren Interactive)


This music program tries to create songs by selecting a kind of mood you're in.
Because there are not much to chose from, most so-called songs are sounding
like somebody cut a few songs in parts of 10 seconds and play them randomly...
Yeah, hot stuff...
 
It's a very old Windows program, however when it came out, (1993 maybe, like the album with the same name), computer programs to make music were hard to find, so I don't want to criticize it a lot.


It started off with the cover of the CD and a soundscape with mashup with short pieces of the songs in a terrible order.
I thought the first time my CD-ROM player just crashed, next time it was just annoying.
Not the best way to start a music program.
 
After listening to parts of the whole CD, it was just the first track. Ugh.


The program does not have any mouse arrow, only by the colour changes or the changed shape on the buttons indicates you know what you are doing (most of the time you don't, trust me).
And because the program wants to run completely from CD-ROM, the "music" you make with this program is continuously stutter.
It sounded like a CD player with lots of power failures.
I got so angry I decided to make an ISO and run it.
That was a slight improvement. Not enough to play the music fluently.
So I copied all files of the CD-Rom and started it and I recorded my first attempt to create some sort of soundscape.
I found out if you do nothing, it plays the whole CD of New World Order, which is the basis of this music program.
The whole album seems to have only songs that were cut in 2 parts, some parts were good, some not.
Later I found out it was Todd Rundgren idea, so you could set your CD-player on shuffle and have every time a new New World Order mix to listen too.


At least one song really hit the spot with "Day Job" the only uptempo song of the album,
It comes an gets you with a pumping bassline, raw guitar riffs with lots of echoes, babytalk, the theme of The Twilight Zone.
Does humour belong in rock music? Yeah, it should.

Todd Rundgren may be the worst white rapper of the 90s, he pushed the message through the song and I like it a lot. Even the very misty video shows how many things Todd did on stage to make his concerts more enjoyable for the audiences like nobody else did at that time. Maybe even U2 used some Todd tricks for their concerts?

The artist himself (Todd Rundgren) was a little famous in those days, a real pioneer in interactive music and busy since the early 70s.
A bit like Peter Gabriel, who had better songs at that time...

I have searched on YouTube for some songs. it seems the genius himself (according to his fans) creates lots of (at first hearing) perfect pop-songs, which all change into the opposite of poppy.
Like he does not want to compose anything that may sound commercial.

He was also the producer of Bourgeois Tagg album YoYo (with their hit I don't mind at all),
that way I knew him already.

After I recorded more than 45 minutes to try to know the program and create a decent mix I let the video on my hard disk for more than 6 months. I had no time and no ideas.

Recently I got some spare time and after hearing the 2nd part of the intro song I developed 2 ideas, 1 video with intro track and credits (or the help page) and some videos with the best mix-parts of the 45 minutes session. 

When I finally got 5 videos uploaded I had learned some lessons:
1) If you want to make high resolution, you have to convert your video material to that resolution first
2) Animated title with a duration of 3 seconds is too short, use at least 5 seconds
3) Big fonts can be a bit off screen AFTER exporting, not in the editor, use fewer words.
4) Matching video and music exactly is impossible without good visual on the waveform of the audio, but almost will do the trick.

BTW Todd Rundgren released a year later (1994) also a New World Order lite with the 10 normal songs. Means to me, he did it only for commercial reasons...


 If you still interested: you can listen here to all the songs, well only 1 minute.

I found some footage of  the CD-I version of New World Order, where Todd is demonstration it, check out part 1 and 2 
And a short TV-story where Todd explains how his CD-I works and why he did it.

And an interesting fan-made mix (without the "Day Job") 
Nee more background story about New World Order? Look at 25