Strange Electronic Sounds

I dabbled with samplers, loops, and audio software, making some weird-ass music along the way.

I have been obsessed with music since I was a kid, and it’s been an integral part of my life for nearly as long. I played in rock bands in Portland in the early nineties as well as more recently. I also managed bands for awhile, mixed bands live and in the studio, booked a nightclub for over five years, and wrote about music for nearly a decade.

I have, however, always been interested in the sound of the music more than the melody or lyrics. This has led me to explore the extremes of experimental electronic music. I tend to prefer material that has at least some rhythmic component. But other than that, the weirder and noisier, the better.

I played around with hardware samplers for years, but gave them all up after computers got powerful enough. I mostly mess with mutilating loops: chopping, stretching and slathering them in effects. I also tend to simply play with sounds without ever finishing a whole “song.” I guess my audio endeavors would be best suited to creating aural atmospheres. And actually, I have dabbled in film sound. [note: In 2026, I finally started cranking out more music – somewhat danceable and maybe a little less weird – and actually released an album online; see below]

Yukster

My first synthesizer was the Moog Concertmate MG-1, sold by Radio Shack. It was $500 in the 80s. My Aunt Gene gave me the money as a gift (my Dad thought it was too much). It was monophonic but it was still a Moog. I played around a fair amount, making noises, but never made any actual songs with it.

Then later, while I was at Hampshire College, I bought a Korg synth. I don’t remember the model name or how much it was but I remember a teacher of mine at Hampshire had one in class and he played the pipe organ sound on it. I was amazed. It was polyphonic and I again played with it a bunch, made some interesting sounds, but didn’t actually compose any music.

I bought my first sampler – an Ensonic EPS – with some money my parents gave me in 1989, a couple years after moving to Portland. Even though I was heavily involved in the Portland indie rock scene at the time, I had always had a love for manipulating, massaging, and messing with the fabric of sound, slicing up samples and making interesting loops.

I never did do much with that EPS, though my drummer in Thrillhamer and I put together a few shitty tracks and presented them at a Satyricon Sunday Cabaret, much to the amusement of the handful of people there. The EPS mostly sat there in my room until I sold it when I needed money.

But only a couple years later – late nineties now – I decided to take another stab at electronic music. I got a Roland SP-808 first and, a little while later, a used rackmount Ensonic ARS-10 (which I’m told was heavily favored by Autechre). I pushed myself to keep at it and managed to finish some “songs” (if you can call them that) in early 2001. I called myself “Yukster” because of the Mr. Yuk (poison control symbol) tattoo that I’ve had since 1991.

I only did a few songs with that gear before discovering the PC looping program called Sonic Foundry Acid. I fell in love with that program (and even used it on some of my film sound work). Using Acid, I slowly produced several more tracks that I could more or less call “finished.”

Then later, I discovered Ableton Live, which is an amazing piece of software. It’s the perfect sound creation tool for me. That being said, in the following years I didn’t really finish that many songs. I do recall that I burned a CD of my first few songs and mailed it to Skint Records in England. They actually replied with a nice letter saying that it wasn’t something they would put out but it was on the right track and to keep in touch. Alas, I did not.

I have futzed around with my strange sound manipulation habit in fits and gasps, rarely sticking with it enough to call something done. I “finished” about 15 songs over the next dozen years. I had pretty much given up by 2012.

Fast forward to 2022. My brother gave me an Ableton Live Lite license key he wasn’t using. I futzed around here and there but still couldn’t really get anywhere. Eventually I decided to shell out almost $400 for Ableton Live 12 Standard, hoping that spending real money would prompt me to finally do something. More occasional farting around ensued but I still couldn’t find my groove (pun intended).

The breakthrough came in early 2026. Tragically it seems it took the death of that brother who gave me the Live key. He had made a lot of music of his own and bought and sold used gear. After his death, I volunteered to take his music gear, hoping that that would inspire me. I also promised myself to at least try to stick with it more than occasional farting around.

Something clicked! I started taking old Live sets that were just stacks of loops and putting down arrangements for them. I started sampling like crazy too. In just six months I had 15 new tracks, as many as I had done in the previous 28 years!

I used to have all 15 of those earlier songs on here but now that I have a new album, I would rather feature that. I called it Back From The Grave since I finally started really making music. It is dedicated to my brother, Ted Munat, who not only inspired me musically, but was also a really amazing human. It can be found on

Bandcamp

or on

Soundcloud.

I will go ahead and share a couple tracks here though:

And what the hell, I’ll keep a few of my old tracks on here. The first two were early tracks made on the SP808 and the ASR-10 (and were two of the tracks I sent to Skint). The third track – Atodaso – is the last track I finished in 2012 before my long hiatus.

Sorry it is super long and gets very, very dark. I also had this weird fixation back then that songs had to be 5 or 6 minutes long. I’m mostly keeping it here because Soundcloud took it down due to alledged copyright infringement… probably for the first few seconds of the song. Heh. Do note that all of these old tracks are on Soundcloud.

INTP

In the early 2000’s, around the time that I was getting into esoteric “glitch” music, I decided I wanted to make some more cerebral music, rather than what, up to then, had been more beat-oriented (though very weird) material. I had taken the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator “personality test” many years before and found out that I am an “INTP.” You can read all about that type on the above site, but suffice it to say that INTP stands for “Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, Perceiving,” which aptly describes me. I figured that would be a great name for this composing persona.

My first batch of compositions under the INTP moniker were the Stretches. These were created by taking a short sample and applying a fixed series of processing steps to it. My original intention was to treat these as something of an exercise or a “stretch.” I’ve long had the tendency to lose interest in a song before I get it to a point at which I would call it “done.” So, with the Stretches, I took a sample (most of them being very recognizable bits from very recognizable songs) and put it through a series of torturous processing steps. Having this set sequence of steps kept me from getting bogged down in indecision and gave me a definite point at which to call it done.

Now because that I lack discipline, I did vary my treatments a little. You could say that my artistic instincts overrode my intellectual intentions. In any case, I found myself hypnotized by the “random” drones that resulted. (Are they random or are they dictated by the pattern of the source sample?) I did fifteen Stretches in all. Here are three of them to check out.

I never did make any other music as INTP, but I still enjoy listening to these once in a while. (I thought about cutting this whole INTP section but what the hell; maybe someone will dig it.)

Now that I have gotten my muse back and cranked out a full album of somewhat funky, beat-oriented, sample-heavy music I hope to keep doing that. Maybe I’ll take a stab at more ambient stuff someday. Actually compose something contemplative rather than just weird noise. I also hope to put some of my own bass playing on some electronic tracks.

Thanks for sticking it out to the end of this long musical memoir! Then again, there is lots of other blabbing to read on this site.

© 2026 Ben Munat. All rights reserved.

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