Pretentious Incongruity: A Key 13 Retrospective

Pretentious Incongruity album cover - a photo of a pebble beach stretching into the sea. A person with a red coat in the foreground, sitting next to a wooden groyne. The writing "Key 13" at the top is surrounded by clip art aardvarks. Under the album name is written 2020-2024

Today marks the release of Pretentious Incongruity: 2020-2024, a retrospective compilation looking back at some key milestones in the lifetime of Key 13 as a recording identity.

You can stream, download and purchase it here:

2020: Key 13 is born

I was always musical when I was younger, but as my life and career developed I just didn't have time. My two ancient Korg keyboards (Poly 61 and M1) have been neglected, gathering dust in the corner and no longer functioning – sadly not touched for over twenty years.

On March 6th, 2020, on a complete whim, I put in an order for a Korg nanoKEY 2 MIDI keyboard, in glorious limited edition orange, green and black. By March 20th, I'd created a SoundCloud account and uploaded my first track.

*[It was called Face Mask, for those who are interested – made with Korg Gadgets, that came free with the nanoKEY. The Covid-19 lockdown was just about to start and this is reflected in many of my track titles from that period.]*

A black miniature midi keyboard, with yellow and orange keys, orange buttons and green writing. The photo has been processed with a stupid effect to repeat it like a kaleidoscope

Given my musical formative years, and that I'd be creating everything with virtual synthesisers, I assumed I'd end up with an early-80s-inspired electronic sound. This led me to think about brutalist and cold war imagery. I'd recently visited an old Soviet nuclear missle silo in Lithuania, so had some photographs to play with. Once converted into stark monochrome, I had the banner photo for SoundCloud:

Tinted black and white photo, cropped into a horizontal banner format, looking down into a missile silo. It's a massive hollow cylinder made of concrete with some lights at the bottom and some open doorways in the walls.

The launch key for the missiles was on display in a cabinet, labelled '13', and I found a photo I'd taken that looked like a possible logo.

A photograph of a bare wall with a stencilled number 13 in red outline, above an unusually shaped brass key

Sometime in April or May 2020, the name Key 13 was born, quite literally, from this photograph.

Since then the meaning of the name has changed for me in a few ways. First, you have to say my actual name in order to pronounce it (try it!). Also, there's a highly pretentious musical theory interpretation that escaped me at first – the classic Western musical scales are made up from 12 notes, or keys – so obviously I want to go one step beyond and find the thirteenth!

When the Russians invaded Ukraine in 2022, the cold war stuff felt a bit too inappropriate and so the images needed to change. Besides which, my music had developed in many different directions. I went through a few variations on a theme, before going back to some old photographs I had taken of my local area – featuring sea, sky, and clouds – and used those.

Current Key 13 website banner photo as of 2025 - a narrowly cropped horizontal picture of a sunset over the sea, with dark clouds in the sky and the sun glinting off the water. In the middle, a floating pale cream cloudy globe with the Key 13 logo written in black in a graffiti-like font.

I still don't like the typography here – it's not a great font, but I couldn't find anything I liked any better, so it'll have to do for now.

2020-2024: Timeline / Milestones

2020

March – nanoKEY 2 purchased, SoundCloud account created

April-May – Key 13 identity created

June – First track created in Logic Pro, Furloughed, shared on Reddit WATMM

September – First track with “realistic” virtual instruments Road With No Name

2021

Very little music created – unable to finish anything, unclear what direction, if any, to take. No good source of feedback or anywhere to share/talk about music. Only three tracks published to SoundCloud in this time – one of which (Invertebration) later became As the Sun Sets Over the Water on the Sea · Sky · Clouds EP.

2022

January – Lateral Flow created in just 9 days, crucially breaking the writer's block

February – Joined /r/songaweek on Reddit, creating Seventh Friend in just a weekend. This proves to be a great creative boost.

March – First major productive phase, first real “songs” with lyrics, vocals – Doomscrolling, City Lights

April-June – created one track every week, in a wide variety of styles.

August-October – created several tracks in the prog-rock 'Utopia' sequence, yet to be formally released outside SoundCloud demos. Also Mournography.

October – joined the Fediverse

2023

February-April – another intensely productive time – The Space Between..., L.U.C.A., Shadow Biosphere, Tick Tock and many others created for /r/songaweek

May-June – Created Solarpunk Grazers and entered it into the 2023 Fedivision Song Contest, where it came joint sixth out of 40+ entries

June-July – Created a Bandcamp account, remastered several tracks for submission to Radio Free Fedi and to put on Bandcamp as singles

August-November – probably the most intensely productive period so far – creating Heretic for the first Not What I Call Bonk Wave compilation, a couple of tracks for NWICBW Vol 2, a run of 6 electronic tracks (including Prompt Engineering and Poetical Science) that will form the core of a future album called The Algorithm and some more slightly psychedelic guitar-based tracks including Sunbeams and Cosmochelonian that will form another EP, hopefully for release later in 2025, which is why they're not on this compilation.

November-December – Launched the Key 13 Faircamp site, and created the Faircamp Web Ring

2024

January – Monotropic and Children of Broken Code created and released

April – Sea · Sky · Clouds EP released, featuring remixed/remastered versions of four tracks. Mirlo account created.

May – Misaligned Aardvarks created and entered for the 2024 Fedivision Song Contest, where it came first out of 70+ entries.

July-November – Took on the compiling/bonk-herding duties for the third Not What I Call Bonk Wave compilation, which proved to be a massive task. Also wrote two tracks for the compilation.

2025: Five years later

I can't believe that five whole years have passed since I bought the nanoKEY, and I've produced so much diverse material under the Key 13 banner (all of it created on the nanoKEY, augmented with a few other input devices) that it's becoming a little difficult to manage and navigate. I thought, after some time, I might start to develop a “signature sound” but that doesn't seem to have happened. The result is a large number of unrelated singles and random tracks on compilations, rather than self-contained albums.

The last year or two has seen a proliferation of new places to share independent music – Faircamp, Mirlo, jam.coop, Bandwagon and more (see this blog post for more details) and it's becoming quite a chore to push all these individual single releases out to every one of these sites. I'm guessing it's not easy for listeners either, assuming I have any – I struggle myself when artists only have single releases, I much prefer listening to albums or EPs.

I really wanted to get some of my old material on to Bandwagon to get it into The Indie Beat Radio but I didn't want to make the existing situation worse. Also, most of my earlier material is not on Mirlo, for the same reasons.

A Retrospective

I came up with the idea of one big release – a five year retrospective, with some of the key tracks I feel mark milestones in my progress, plus some that just felt they should be there. And one or two which slipped onto the album by chance and probably shouldn't be there at all!

There's very little in common between any of these tracks except universally poor production, and an excess of ambition vastly outstripping talent.

Pretending to be a musician...
Pretending I know what I'm doing...
Everything mismatched and inconsistent...

Pretentious Incongruity.

This post was supposed to just be notes for each track, explaining a bit about how they were created, and why they might have a special place in the collection. But it's already several pages long, so I think that will have to be another article.

See: Track notes

"Pretentious Incongruity 2020-2024" text on a speckled blue background, cropped from the bottom of the album cover

A note on production quality

My production skills started out at zero, so pretty much all these tracks needed some attention.

A number of them were remastered in 2023 so that I could submit them to the sorely-missed Radio Free Fedi, and those are the versions that have been on Bandcamp and Faircamp up to now. But I didn't get too deeply into the mixes so there were still some issues. This retrospective felt like an opportunity to revisit them, and also to include some other tracks which might deserve a proper release.

I'm still quite bad at this mixing/mastering side of things, but hopefully this release addresses some of the bigger issues with most of the tracks.

Three months of work

I've spent the last three months remixing and remastering all this material, exclusively for this release. That's probably longer than it took to create them in the first place!

Despite that, I'm still really unhappy with most of them and there's several tracks I don't want to hear ever again as a result. Misaligned Aardvarks still sounds pretty dreadful to my ears. Heretic is just impossible to get the drums and bass right (for me, anyway) – this is about the 8th mix of that track I've done over its lifetime and I'm not sure it's any better than the first one. I did so many different (all bad) mixes of City Lights that I can no longer figure out which one has actually ended up on the album. I nearly left if off in a fit of pique, but it, like many others, has a special place here.

Maybe no-one else will notice the differences. Probably no-one ever heard the originals in the first place, and I doubt many people will listen to everything here. But I know, and I feel a tiny bit better about fixing the worst bits.

I'm equally sure I'll listen back in a few months and find still more glaring issues, some of them newly introduced with these mixes. I can't listen to my Sea · Sky · Clouds EP any more, it's so harshly mastered – the version of The Space Between... on here was tweaked from the original mix & master, not the EP version, which hurts my ears. But I guess that's the way it goes.

Why not pay someone else to do it properly?

I did think about paying for some professional production help – but that's where the whole Imposter Syndrome thing kicks in. I can afford it, but is any of this good enough to warrant that? Realistically very few people will listen to this stuff, and even fewer will pay money for it. Would that change if it was better mixed? Probably not. Do I really want to inflict that process onto anyone else, even for money?! Most of it probably needs re-arranging and re-recording from scratch anyway to have even the remotest chance of sounding good.

So, sadly, you're still stuck with my terrible efforts.

If it's any consolation, I think I have learned some things during the process, so perhaps any new releases going forward might be a bit better. Not much, but a bit.

Maybe now I've got this out of my system I might find another creative spark, as between this and the NWICBW3 compilation, I haven't written or released very much music lately.