Music made by Richard Moss Laskey, III. Ext83 is a series of attempts at finding new genres / spaces using both composition and sound design. You can reach me me via Twitter or by email. I also have a page on Last.fm.
Signs and Symbols
Allison put together the following video for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts as documentation for their 2009/2010 Community Arts Initiative Artist Project. I had the privilege of then taking the video and making a track to go alongside.
Making the soundtrack was an interesting project, since it had to cater to both the museum and the general public, yet also also speak to the project itself: kids making their own graffiti-styled artwork. I went towards a classic 808 kit, a more mellow tempo, and some heavily processed strings.
You can read a bit more about the project at the MFA website. It was a great experience, and I'm glad I was able to be a part of it.
84
My first EP, titled "84", has been available since 2007. You may listen to all five tracks in full via Last.fm. You may also grab a copy of the EP in WAV/MP3/etc. by donating $3USD using the PayPal button to the right or by contacting me via the methods listed above.
Grane
This is the first track I've ever completed, second of five in "84". I started out in Logic 7, which was the first DAW I'd ever touched. I'm not sure how many hours I've put into tweaking this track along the way, though it certainly was a hell of a lot. I learned a lot about mixing, sequencing, and what it takes to make a track, and the result is something I'm still proud of today.
A theme for all tracks in 84 was that I had to have a live section which was unplanned, and the result of me dabbling on the keyboard in real time. I only have my right hand for the keys since I was born an amputee, and I've had zero classical training. Even so, I kept playing with certain progressions and came up with what you hear after 2:22 or so during my second and third take. Well, OK, so there was a lot of note clean-up and some editing from the actual MIDI session; but even so, I still like where it went.
I placed Grane as the second track in the 84 EP after "Sane" since the latter was my first time that I had utilized a live MIDI session, enabling me to feel as though I'd actually completed a song. They're both special to me, though to me Grane is more about beauty and pushing through; Sane is it's spaced-out downtempo hip-hop tinted cousin who opened the door for the rest which came through.
Why "Ext83"
The name Ext83 comes from the fact I was born in the year 1983. "Ext" isn't a particular word, though I like it in that it can stand for a number of things: "exten(d/sion)", "extru(de/sion)", etc.