from "self titled albums are gay" (released 2010 privately on mediafire) i started making noise and sample collages as soon as i got a laptop when i was 13, before i knew it was an established thing. me and my friend jay would just layer a bunch of screaming into the webcam mic, cut up the worst prepackaged garageband loops, hold down the lowest and highest octaves on the preset synths, and throw in samples of stuff we found funny, then layer it all in distortion filters. we were basically just trying to make the most annoying music possible to entertain ourselves after school. black condom started as our new alias for noise music in early 2010 at age 15. originally we named it black condo , as a joke on the band whitehouse. we started the first black condom tracks as a concept EP that was supposed to soundtrack masturbating. (very gerogerigegege in retrospect) we abandoned it almost immediately but i kept making noise collages on my own , usually early in the morning out of boredom. this track is named after a tf2 youtuber that deleted their account. the second part is half of a noise track where i really outdid myself on the annoying factor. i made around 40 of these abominations in 2010 that i compiled as "self titled albums are gay" and sent to friends through mediafire. at this point i was still making intentionally bad music on purpose and adopting a faux transgressive persona through the titles and samples. the idea was just being stupid and edgy on purpose, i had absolutely no dillusion of "shocking" anyone and kind of went with the project as a rebel without a cause character to play because that's the kind of snot nosed image i felt noise music went to naturally. i was a 15 year old that went on 4chan so why try to be anything else?

from "Ambrasive" (released 2011 on mediafire) this track was made in one night , made almost completely out of distorted drum presets. this is what i did instead of going to school. after self titled... and countless quickly made EPs my experimenting was getting to a point where i was actually trying to make things that appealed to me, even though i really still had zero idea how to do much of anything i wanted. i was still using exclusively samples , garageband loops, and presets. i didn't even know how to use a piano roll at this point. everything was DIY and i never really looked up tutorials on music production or theory. to this day my music is just a timeline of me learning how to do things i could easily learn thru youtube or an intermediate piano lesson. making things only from intuition and trial/error makes me more creative with my process but the quality of what i do still suffers enormously and makes listening to anything pre-2013 hard for me. i finished "Ambrasive" in early 2011 and it was the first album i ever put on mediafire that i feel like i really worked hard on. the brat attitude was still there but i was conciously making stuff i wanted to listen to now. my evolution was starting. "my name is black condom/im fucking stupid/i make some beats/cause i can't make music" was kind of a mantra i wanted to define the whole project, but at the same time i was TRYING to make music. half the tracks on ambrasive were melodic experiments of me playing synth presets out of key on my laptop keyboard. instead of only using garageband loops i was starting to mix them with my own percussive sounds i made from recording found sounds into my webcam mic. the sounds were shoddy, and the music wasn't good but i was learning how to do things, and developing a fusion of aggressive noise and breakcore with ambient and computer music i called "ambrasive music"

from "Ambrasive" (released 2011 on mediafire) this track was a high point of my melodic/musique concrete experiments that i was really proud of when i made it. also one of my first pieces of art dedicated to tea. in 2015 when i started playing live, i brought it back for fun and used the same electric kettle to make myself tea with a mic absorbing the steam for ambient noise. it was neat but a pain in the ass to involve a tea kettle filled with water in a mobile electronic setup.

unreleased, from 2011 this track was named after a user on a my little pony forum/imageboard i frequented at the high of the whole "pony thing". they posted a goodbye message about how they were gonna commit suicide and when i checked the thread the next day, it had been deleted. i made this song quickly in one night as a tribute to this possibly dead brony. i was listening to a lot of oval at the time and basically ripped off their track "do while". i didn't know until years later when i found a thread archive that they ended up being ok, and saw all the support people sent them.

from "Weed Gets U High" (released 2012 on bandcamp) by late 2011 i already had some tracks i was starting to organize into a new album. i was showing some stuff to jay and my friend koda and they ended up sending me faux album art for my next album which they named "Weed Gets U High". i was 17 and had never smoked weed in my life. i immediately started shaping up my first concept album. at this point i was getting really active online for the first time and meeting people through tumblr and mutual friends. when the album was done i got 17 friends to make art for each of the songs, a lot of whom are people im still close pals with today, and a lot who i don't talk to anymore. the accidental hype cycle of getting so many people involved first hand made it my most downloaded album ever. the clickbait stupid name/art helped too. it was also my most adventurous music to date. i was starting to get a handle on garageband and was using every trick in my book. i was playing with weird time signatures for the first time since i was obsessed with venetian snares. this was one of the first tracks i made for the album. it started as an experiment in making a polyrhythm (the drum break is in 7/4 , the piano is in 3/4 , and there's a steady 4/4 kick under them) then i added some samples of a transmission from a lost spacecraft and a skype call with my then-partner. i wish i rerecorded that piano on my actual piano instead of using midi but them's the amateur breakz.

from "Weed Gets U High" (released 2012 on bandcamp) this was one of my favorites on my weed goof album. i built it around a stock ukelele sample im pretty sure i found by googling "ukelele sample" also every track on the album half-tongue-in-cheek used the amen break because i thought it was super funny how cliche it was, but also just loved chopping that break unironically. the bass is from the kwwrr song "ohgom" from his album "cool baby" the title was a reference to retsupuraes lets play of the game "darkseed 2" where there was a monster they kept calling shrimp baby. will there come a time when i stop making my music jokes so insidery? prob not

from "Weed Gets U High" (released 2012 on bandcamp) im pretty sure this one started as an idea i had while i was a cashier at building 19 (rip a wonderful thrift shop that no longer exists) the cash registers were super old. i think they were there since the 80s or 90s and they made weird horrible mechanical sounds when they printed reciepts. i would fantasize about making weird steely breakdowns with them during my shift. musical ideas just came from that and i made this after work. the lead melody is made from pitch shifting a toothbrush. it was also the first track i made a music video for. it was just distorted footage of me in my office chair, wearing a mask and army helmet, smoking a cartoonishly big fake blunt and dying from a weed overdose. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9IF4SckbLI

from "Weed Gets U High" (released 2012 on bandcamp) this track was named after a bit in louis ck's show where he's monologuing to his children about the infinity of the mind. i appropriated it as a fake deep mantra to fit the weeded out theme. there are a bunch of samples of my friend steve's cat in this song. it's also in 5/4 which i don't think i had done before. i was trying out a lot of time signatures in 2012.

unreleased, from 2012 this was a track from the early stages of brainstorming vaguely stoner-y or tropical feeling tracks for the weed album. i left this one off because it starts to suck after the first 30 seconds, but digging it up after almost 5 years, that intro makes a great little loop.

from "The Kanye EP" (unreleased, from 2011) me and jay got really into kanye after MBDTF came out in 2011, so we made a 10 minute EP dedicated to him. it was made super quick and was super terrible but this track still makes me laugh. chopping this up manually took at least an hour.

from "BMC Remixed" (released 2011) breakmaster cylinder is honestly too good for this world if i can gush for a minute here. i was super into youtube poop in 2008-09 and would religiously listen to everything released on mrsimons weblabel "breakbit music" (RIP) it was one of the big things that got me into electronic music in the first place. (i also submitted weed gets u high to them, but they turned me down politely because my production was too unpolished) bmc was my favorite artist on breakbit, and when they made an open call to remix their new album in 2011 i was super hyped. i was that one asshole that asked for stems from literally every song so i could make a mashcore megamix. not only did they oblige me, but they were super nice when my edgy teen self put a cheap rape joke in the title. (which i changed immediately when they asked) they even compared me to kid606 who was one of my fav artists at the time. that little bit of encouragement kept me going for a long time, and when the album came out with my dumb limp bizkit mashup as the opening track, it was the ultimate validation. a couple years later i emailed bmc for a quote on my new album , and a couple years after that i asked them to join the weblabel i was starting. bmc is one of the nicest people i've ever met and if an edgy 17 year old ever comes to me with a remix, i'll be hard pressed not to be nice to them. https://breakmastercylinder.bandcamp.com/album/bmc-remixed-dog-deux-selections-from-musique-pour-les-pubs-de-nourriture-pour-chiens

from "Pinkamina" by Decibelle (released 2012) back in my pony loving heyday, there was a grimdark askblog by an artist then called "crookedtrees". it was a cute, funny, sometimes sad bit of fandom about pinkie pie being a serial killer. my little pony and serial killers were two of my favorite things when i was 17. trees was one of my favorite artists in general, and for a short time we talked on skype and were good pals. they were like the visual art equivilent of bmc in my percieved mentor-dom. (in my head, being treated as an equal to somebody i admired was the best type of mentor scenario) they retreated from the internet at some point and left me with it and we haven't talked since. i met decibelle in 2012 because i found them on bandcamp through the pony tag, and when i found out they were doing an album based off the ask blog and told them i knew trees, and they let me do a remix. we haven't talked since like... 2013 i think? they make ambient music now. i should really shoot both of these ghosts of my past a message. https://ernulaxcuilan.bandcamp.com/album/pinkamina

from "Lyra's Fat Jiggly Asscheeks EP" (released 2012) late 2012 i was getting really fed up with the pony world. clearly i had no problem with perverting a kids cartoon, but people were getting aggressive and way too public with the gross shit, and it was becoming a mean and argumentative space with a hideous public image, which was exactly the opposite of why i got into it originally. in satirical reaction to that horrible image i released an EP of 4 EDM tracks vaguely relating to ponies that i had laying around. koda (who also named weed gets u high) named it "lyra's fat jiggly asscheeks" for me, after my skype icon. i'm still embarrassed by that name, so thanks koda. my friends were embarrassed FOR me when i released it with a big ugly plush pony vagina on the cover. those gross pony folks ate it up and it became my new most downloaded album. the irony was lost and i deleted it after a while.

unreleased, from 2013 by late 2012 i'd had my fill of being annoying on purpose and felt a need to make something more personal that i could take at least a little seriously, and started making spacey, bass heavy "dubs" in early 2013 i released "Black Condom", a self titled i worked extremely hard on, and wanted to redefine the project with. it was a mix of alien feeling ambient pads, midi orchestral music, and heavy dubstep beats with no amen breaks in sight. (i was starting to collect sound packs, and used one drum and bass pack for almost the entire album) basically, nobody fucking liked it , and looking back i see it as way too plodding and badly produced. not that my previous stuff wasn't badly produced, but i prefer the embarrassing stuff i had fun with to the joyless braindance i was making here. but at the time i was prouder than i'd ever been of an album. this track was a scrapped interlude that i probably trimmed to make the album more lean. just softsynth drones and samples of an old robot dog i had as a kid. this is an early example of me sampling objects and pieces of media that i have personal memories with, that ended up totally defining what i did later that year on "Sentimental Bias"

unreleased, from 2013 i remember making this late at night when i was miserably depressed. i cut it from the album because i thought it was too minimal but looking back, i enjoy it more than most of what ended up on the actual album. it has a simplistic synthetic quality that i like about it. i was too sad and lazy to put tons of work into the sounds i used, and ended up with a glassy, repetitive piece of music that's more emotive than most of the cold detatched dubs i was making at the time.

from "Black Condom" (released in 2013) this was the crown jewel from the self titled album, it was my favorite then and i still dig it. in summer 2012 i went to a residency program at an art institute and couldn't make any music. i imagined a song that sounded like it was swelling and pulsing from ear to ear. winter of that year i finally tried to make it, and built everything off of that one slow attack sine wave. the vocals are sampled from "antichrist" which is still one of my favorite movies. one character is telling the other to imagine herself laying in green grass and melting into the color to overcome her fear of nature. this was the new mission statement for black condom. i wanted to make music i could sink into. it was pure escapism from my depression. i tested my levels by playing the songs in my parents cars and closing my eyes to focus on the vibrations. this was also the second song i made a music video for. it was all blurry close ups of things in my house that i saw every day, mostly the tea kettle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZhebRXGeL0

from "Black Condom" (released in 2013) i wanted to make an animal collective remix EP for about a minute in 2013 but ended up not doing that. this was the only thing that came out of the idea. spirit they're gone is one of my favorite songs of all time. i'd never heard anyone make harsh noises beautiful, or use noise to convey deep longing and emotion. it was like the exact opposite of what i thought noise was good for when i started black condom. that mixed with the lyrics about having to leave your childhood behind destroyed me. when i first heard it i was paralyzed by the beauty and i still sometimes cry when i hear it.

unreleased, from 2013 one of the big influences for taking black condom to space in 2013 was fifty grand's self titled album from that year. (also wagawagas album "jinjinoon bus" deserves a shout out) i was captivated by how they used trap foundations to make something so dreamlike and emotional. when fifty made an open call for tracks for a mixtape they were making, i whipped this up in a few days and sent it over. i never got a response but i still kinda dig the track, at least more than most stuff on my self titled. the little snippits of creepy vocals were inspired by jim ethers track "the univarse" and taken from the film "titicutt follies" which is incredibly depressing.

unreleased, from 2013 this was my last nail in that ugly pony coffin. i miss making bullshit like this. maybe if another stupid little girls show captures my imagination i can turn off my self expectations and start making fun music just to kill time again. bye bye black condom, you changed so much in 7 years and i'm a totally different person now. for every annecdote in this short compilation album, theres 100 more that i remember with vivid detail. really the only reason this album exists is for my own nostalgia and archival tendencies, as well as for any friends who were there with me during this projects life. maybe i sampled you, or made something with you, or maybe you just downloaded weed gets u high and deleted it later. its honestly wild that i've kept this monikor for so long considering how many stylistic and tonal changes its been through. its really just been a long catalogue of my own growth, learning how to make music i want to hear. there's an innocence to these first couple years of black condom, and a memory to all the hundreds of little piss takes in my project folder. its stayed pretty true to the original goals of provocation and juxtaposition of ambient and ambrasive, but stretched out in a lot of directions i never thought a project that started so throwaway and jokey would go. thank you. fuck off now.