I released a bunch of new music on Friday, February 2nd, and most of it is in the above Spotify playlist. I’ll talk about each track below.
“Feeling Calmer” by Calmer Feeling - a lazy title, but appropriate. Gentle, lulling ambient waves. I want to take a nap while listening to this.
“Nice Breeze” by Ambient Matyk - more ambient waves, but with a faster wake.
“Cold Energy” by Aleodeology - Aleodeology is ambient music without much variation throughout the composition. This is more like gentle “soft industrial” noise rather than music. Aleodeology has a 7 track album scheduled for release on March 1, 2024, but has a huge catalog going back to 2020.
“Borealis Flowing” by Meditative Drift - More ambient waves, with limitations, but also a bit more variation.
“Persistence Pays Off” by Tanpura Express - Layered drones with processed tabla.
“Sthapatya Veda” by Saag Paneer - Heavily processed, layered drones. This is dense and hypnotic! SP is “only drones” now to differentiate it from Tanpura Express, which is more beat-oriented.
“Nervous Tick Rhythm Box” by Samesed - Dense processing of a drum machine beat to the point where the rhythm is thrown off a bit. Samesed is what I use for experiments, good mistakes, snippets, etc. I throw a lot of recordings out, but sometimes there are interesting things on the cutting room floor.
“Endless Jackpot” by Chillout Preservation Collective - A bit more processed that typical CPC releases, which are often in the “downtempo” instrumental style. I probably should have called it something like “Jacob’s Ladder” because that’s what the sound looks like to me, but that phrase has been used a lot.
“Fade and Away” by Vibrating Wires - Desolate, processed lap steel guitar. This is what I call my “incidental music”. It has a kind of tension. It’s the kind of quick thing you might hear in the background of a film or TV show if you listen close enough. In March, I’m releasing a 20 track album of similar recordings by VW.
If you think that’s crazy, I’ve 34 tracks scheduled for release for March. A lot of it was made, edited, and titled in the past couple of years, and I only recently got around to compiling and scheduling it for release. And I’ve been on a significantly reduced release schedule after my father passed away in early October 2023. Plus I have a day job. And other things going on.
As for the fine art / painting, that has slowed down. I think in 2024 I’m mostly going to focus on smaller ink paintings that I use as “album and single covers” for my recordings. I’m just not sure how to repurpose some of the art for the Gallery. I was thinking of coming up with a couple of t-shirt designs, but that takes time to figure out and there’s always a million rules. It’s far faster for me to crop and create for tote bags, which I love. I like functional art. T-shirts are functional art, but tote bags I use every day.
Last thing - I did some ambient live streaming on Saturday night. The first several minutes were ruined by a problem with the left channel that I didn’t notice for a while. Then the batteries died in my audio recorder, causing the audio to fail until new batteries were installed. After that, it was smooth sailing! I think live streaming is a blast. There are so many fail points, but overcoming them is like solving a puzzle.