Weekend Warrior - along with ((music for earphones)) and the adjacent material - came about after a brief sojourn as Hypothetical Sofa making clumsy stabs at low slung trippy sample mash up trip hop. Very diegetic and cartoony even, fiercely intimate and idiosyncratic - but sofa was a hot mess and by the end of 2005 something - I don't remember what - made me tighten the screws. Starting 2006 a very 18 year old Skwirl (then Mr. Squirrel) was making these mad mashes ripping samples from household/self acquired cds with rudimentary audio editing software and chucking that wildly at a 16 track virtual sequencer that required live performance (no offline or linear arrangement possible) and once a good take had tumbled out then off on a dash over to my stepdad's Sony Vio, which for some reason had Sound Forge on it, to do crazy effects and mental layers of things - that then had to travel via zip disk back to my room...all to make these trippy, dense, kaleidoscopic, intimate, bombastic, experimental, and dare I say dope sample collage, mega mash up style big beat meets downtempo meets trip hoppy tunes from literally hundreds upon hundreds of samples of all sorts of things.

To be fair a lot my memory of making music at that time was excitedly running down the hallway with a zip disk or something of the like so i could put the thing from one thing into another thing to do the thing to then take back to the first thing and make it do that thing. I remember being overwhelmed when I got Logic that I didn't have to do that anymore and that I could arrange things on an offline linear path and didn't have to make half dozen print mix performances of the tunes.

And from there we went!

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Samples/elements:

1: so I'll try my best to remember samples:

some Les Baxter thing

Beck - Deadweight

The Who - Who Are You?

(dunno about the flute)

Pink Floyd - Any Colour You Like

the piano is certainly a sample from something but I'm only one man.

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2: Sergio Mendes and Brazil '66 - Promise of a Fisherman
Classics IV - Spooky
John Coltrane - Naima
Stereolab - Diagonals

(some other things I'm forgetting...)

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3. Coldcut - Colours The Soul

Masashi Hamauzu - Besaid (ビサイド島 Bisaido-jima) (Final Fantasy X)

Underworld - Tongue

Stan Getz · Luiz Bonfa · Maria Toledo - Menina Flor

Seals and Crofts - Diamond Girl

don't remember the trumpet and the band stabs I'm afraid...defo from an anime but not sure which....

OMG one of the tunes on the Batman Beyond soundtrack...

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4. Oh that bug game that came on that iMac OS thing in the noughts.

(very emo 17 year old vocals)- web mic business

Zero 7 - End Theme

U2 - Last Night on Earth

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5. Underworld - Juanita/Kiteless [Everything, Everything]

Liquid Fingers - Nasty Habits

The Daughter of Time (Audiobook) by Josephine Tey - Read by Derek Jacobi

I think there's an little slice of Massive Attack's Blue Lines in there too...

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6. Jack Wall - Edanna (Myst 3 Exile Soundtrack)

Björk - I Miss You

I can remember vividly chopping this break by using different combinations of fingers in the browser sequencer.

fuck a really cool nu jazz tune - I'll update when I remember it.

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7. Sergio Mendes and Brazil '66 - Promise of a Fisherman

John Coltrane - Like Sonny

I don't remember the skank and dude I'm completely skipping breaks in these - I don't really but kind of vaguely remember - I will not attempt to.

Madonna (produced by William Orbit) - Swim

...one of those charming but ultimately naff "world sounds" type kitch Bed Bath and Beyond cds - Celtic obviously

Caribou - Twins

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8. (my web mic had totally died by this point and made these gnarly distortions)

Lemon Jelly - Nervous Tension

America - Horse With No Name

shit I'm spacing this next one - it's a super dope trip hop almost big beat record. will update. edit- it's the Wiseguys...don't remember the tune just now.

an interstellar jazz sample from a hip hop tune on one of those Scion promo mix cds I think. will update when I figure it out...maybe the Peanut Butter Wolf one?

I don't remember the piano loop but shit I wish I'd found that now.

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9. stuff.

oh and some X Files music (Mark Snow)

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10. I really don't think there's too much of the mash up in this it was a fucking weird "make a song that is a palindrome" experiments.

there had been a very ill advised and largely illegal roadtrip with Justin, Phillip, and Tim, and "airports yes" was an inside joke. (I guess my web mic was working at this point)

big ups to Sound Forge XP destructive processing.

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11. Yes - Roundabout

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[all of the sequencing in these tunes had to be performed live in takes. if I wanted a stereo loop, I needed to sacrifice two slots.]

[I had to remember keyboard combos to cue and stutter intro the loops. it's over engineered now...] ;)

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all tracks assembled, arranged and recorded by Mr. Squirrel

Mastered 2024 by Jacob Korn @ Tailout