Finally had a chance for final mastering and upload of this, my second bandcamp release:

This is best described as a self-remix piece.

The core sound materials were produced in the period 2001-2004. Some of these were fully-formed pieces in their own right (e.g. a version of comes pale horse, from 2002; and an unused mix of Outside, from 2003). Others were sound snippets that had no home, or other unfinished pieces like enoch and march (many of these may still be on the SoundCloud site: I don’t link to any of them here, since I’m sure I’ll eventually have to clear out some space over there, I’m running out of minutes). All told, something like 12 existing pieces were used to generate the track given here.

Some background: In early 2006, I had started wondering what it would be like to potentially play a piece like this live. How on earth would one do such a thing? Would it even be possible to do such a thing? So I had loaded the materials into Ableton Live, treated the various sounds, and (after a few sessions of rehearsing) improvised an overall piece that ran a little less than 50 minutes total. At the time, I thought of this of an experiment in re-purposing available recorded materials into a live, improvised piece of music. Essentially just a remix, but that’s not a term I would have used in 2006. This session generated the core of what ended up being recorded.

I was reasonably happy with the result, but (again) at the time, I saw no practical outlet for a 50 minute long instrumental/collage piece (at least none that was available to me), and no local venues that would ever be interested in having someone perform something like this live.

So I shelved the project. And essentially went into musical retirement. What was the point, really? I had a profession to pursue, a day job. I owned a house now. An adopted family, too. And the musical landscape just didn’t seem friendly to the kind of sounds and music that I wanted to make. (And, in hindsight, buying that stupid Xbox 360 in 2007, as my go-to ‘stress reliever’, was probably a terrible mistake).

Fast forward to mid 2012. I had already started to re-assemble my home studio (or what was left of it– some of the hardware had failed and had to be replaced, and some of my software licenses had expired, or been lost altogether), and started to get back into playing guitar, if only for old times’ sake. An impulse buy of ACID Pro let me explore archived electronic music projects, some of the first I had ever done– and before too long I had gotten the distinct feeling that I was picking up right where I had left off a few years’ prior.

I had just re-committed to making music, gotten the studio/workspace up and running again, and promised myself to try and make at least one piece of music a week when I stumbled onto the Disquiet Junto. And I do mean stumbled. I had started to follow a few blogs, experimental/ambient music sites, online zines, netlabels, twitter feeds, etc. to find out what had been going on while I had been ‘retired’… and all roads, somehow, led to the Junto.

But back to this release, in particular. In keeping with the ‘pick up where you left off’ theme, I did not substantially alter the makeup of the original 2006 live remix. Some re-balancing of the sounds was done, and also some post-processing and envelope leveling to make the piece more listenable. So this is material from 2001-2004, remixed ‘live’ in 2006, revisited and remastered in 2013.

This release gets made as the aforementioned marriage comes to an end (amicably, but still…), the stepdaughter launches into adulthood with reasonable success, and the job and house and landlord duties are no longer overwhelming responsibilities, but rather just Things I Do. End of an Era, as the old cliche goes.

Nice time for a Final Remix for the era 2001-2013. (Which equals one orbit of Jupiter, oddly enough).

Time for the next orbit…

(Released under a Creative Commons license, Attribution, Share-alike, derivs ok).