Hi all:

It seems frivolous to be announcing this kind of thing in the midst of the terrible issues so many people are facing right now, but I’ll ask you to excuse me for moving forward with the plans I already had in place for the upcoming week. The prosaic struggle to keep up with my bills from one month to the next continues alongside the much larger life-and-death struggles that are taking place in the world. I hope that all of you are keeping safe, doing well & avoiding the brutal actions of the police as best you can.

 

On the first Friday of both June and July, Bandcamp has scheduled more of the full-day events where they pass along to the artist the full revenue share of any downloads that are purchased. To coincide with these, I’ve continued my restoration & release of some of the very early, barely-if-at-all-released irr. albums that have been lingering in my archives for the past 20-odd years. The one prepared for June 5th is ‘Foreign Matter, Nor Frequency Carrier’: the second planned irr. album which was assembled in it’s initial form in 1998, partly revised for a release that never took place in 1999, revised again in the early 00s, and then allowed to slumber undisturbed until four years ago. In 2016 I began a clean-up & re-assembly attempt from the raw sources, but lost momentum halfway through. I’ve finally completed the job. Two bonus tracks have been added: one being a track from the same period that has never been released, and the other being an isolated extract of one of the underlying elements from one of the album tracks.

The original version of ‘Foreign Matter’ was extremely flawed, so I’ve allowed myself a bit more leeway to elaborate on the tracks and fulfill the intent behind them rather than just reconstruct the existing material — but in doing this I’ve restricted myself to using only the sources that were created at the time. I’ve also revised the artwork a little for the same reason. As with the recent ‘Inception’ reissue, some exhaustive liner notes will be included, in addition to the text created for the 1999 version.

Speaking of ‘Inception’, it was released as scheduled on May 7th and can be got here.

The album in preparation for the next Bandcamp fee holiday on Friday July 3rd is ‘Radiant Black Future’. After that, regardless of Bandcamp doing any more of these events, I’m hoping to continue my momentum and get the other two ‘lost’ albums — 2000’s ‘Not Hidden But Concealed’ and 2011’s ‘Vulgar Probabilities’ — restored and released on the same monthly schedule.

The release date of the next two monthly singles will be adjusted to take full advantage of these same no-fee events, so instead of being posted on the last day of the month they will appear on the 5th and then the 3rd of the subsequent month, respectively.

Apologies again to all of you who don’t like the purely digital format! With luck, I’ll find a way to arrange a physical-format version of these before long. It’s working out much better for me to issue material like this first, because it allows me simply to finish the content and put it out immediately without the inevitable problems & long delays that come with any kind of manufacturing, and keeps a bit of money coming in on a more regular schedule. With the audio & graphics already done, arranging for some kind of packaging later on will be a much easier process.

Huge thanks to you all for continuing to give your support during these turbulent times! It means a great deal, and I honestly don’t know how I would manage without your help.

 

all the best

–msw