The world just keeps getting crazier! Since my last post, I’ve had to spend part of the past month hiding indoors to avoid a vast cloud of toxic smoke… apparently a global pandemic and a megalomaniacal president aren’t enough. Fortunately, the local frogs seem to have survived the hazardous air; I’ve been amassing a catalogue of little portraits of them, which you can see on my Instagram page here: www.instagram.com/m.s.waldron. They’re also on my personal Facebook page (not the irr. FB page).
The September installment of ‘Vesicular Distributor’ is now available! I’m particularly happy with how this one turned out. It’s Bandcamp’s Fee-less Friday, so if you get it sometime today, all the proceeds (except for the PayPal fees) will go directly to me. The single is all that I’ve posted this month: it’s tempting to pile on a bunch of new stuff every time one of these fee-less days comes up, but I’m concerned that people are getting burned out on it. I might have a couple of extra things next month.
As I mentioned in the last update, I’ve remixed and remastered the audio for ‘Nocturnal Emissaries‘. I just wasn’t satisfied with the version I posted last month. If you’ve bought a copy, you should be able to go to my Bandcamp site and download it again to get the revised version. It’s not enormously different: the adjustments I’ve made mostly involve some refinement of the details and cleaning up some messy frequencies.
Hope you’re all doing well and staying clear of wildfires, toxic clouds of smoke, viruses, racist extremists, eight-legged donkeys and sociopathic police.
Just wanted to express my gratitude to everyone who supported the new Bandcamp listings this past Friday (and afterwards)! Although I wasn’t quite able to make up for the full month of income I missed in August due to computer-less-ness, there were definitely enough sales to keep me solvent and get the bills paid, and that means a lot — especially since those bills included the cost of a new computer. I typically would not have the financial resources to cover a big expense like that! But, thanks to the help of all you sexy people out there, I’m still in the pink… or the black… or whichever colour means you’re not completely broke. Maybe it’s ‘in the green’.
I also wanted to send out an apology: upon reviewing the mix of ‘Nocturnal Emissaries’ that was released on Friday, I feel that I fell short of a reasonable standard of quality. I had reviewed the mixdown several times before posting and thought everything sounded good, but apparently I didn’t give myself enough distance from it. When working on something and listening to it repeatedly day after day, it’s always useful for me to set it aside for a few days so I can get some objectivity back; I was in way too much of a hurry to get everything ready by Friday, so some sloppy work slipped through. I’ve already begun revising the track, and will send out an announcement (here and through Bandcamp) after I post the repaired version. Anyone who bought it should be able to go to Bandcamp and download the new version with no problem. More on this soon.
One more quick note: I finally managed to post the ‘HCA‘ album (not ‘HAC’ as mis-typed in the last update) to Bandcamp… about 6 hours later than I had planned. At least I was able to stay awake long enough to finish it today… but now I’ll need to slide into a coma for a couple of days…
The new items mentioned in the last update have now been posted to the irr. Bandcamp site. These are:
The July installment of Vesicular Distributor (I accidentally posted both of the August images last time)
The August installment of Vesicular Distributor
The irr.-manipulation-of-NWW-live-sources album ‘A Darker Shade Of Fat’
The new irr. album ‘Nocturnal Emissaries’
And — not posted yet, but I’m nearly ready with it and am really looking forward to finishing it so I can actually get some sleep someday — the spoken word album ‘HCA’, which is an absurdist derangement of the already really peculiar writings of Hans Christian Andersen. I used his texts, but strategically omitted parts of them to make the content more abstract — although with the restriction of not changing or re-ordering any of the content, just leaving out parts of it. Should be posted in the next couple of hours.
After a month of being computer-less, I’m finally fully reconnected and functional. The unexpected failure of the replacement computer I’d set up after my earlier unexpected computer failure created some serious obstacles for me… I was unable to post the July installment of ‘Vesicular Distributor’ (or anything else), I couldn’t get any work done, I couldn’t access any of my files, I couldn’t access this website, and I could only get meagre internet access from one of those awful smartphones everyone seems to love so much. This has taught me to keep a written password key somewhere in my studio: these days there are more passwords than I can possibly commit to memory, so if the device with my password manager fails, it shuts me out of a lot of important resources. An old-styley analog backup can be a useful thing.
A public service announcement: do not order a computer directly from Dell! I’ve never been particularly knowledgeable about hardware, so I thought this would be a good way to get some proper tech advice from a sales rep before I bought anything. The result was hardly shy of outright fraud. I didn’t have any internet access at the time, so I called the Dell help line and placed my order on the phone (never do this!); I was sold a brand new computer with a good processor, but sent an old, discontinued computer with a older, slower processor, and was charged more for it than had been quoted over the phone. Fortunately, I was able to return the dud machine and get a refund, but it took endless hours of being left on hold to get it sorted out. And by the time I got my refund I had been left stranded for a month without a computer — which meant being unable to work, which meant being unable to generate any income. Most of you probably already know this and are more tech-savvy than I am, but in case you aren’t: stay away from Dell direct sales! In the age of reckless Amazon indifference, it seems impossible to find honest & transparent dealings anywhere.
On to more positive news: I have the July and August installments of Vesicular Distributor ready to post in time for Bandcamp’s no-fee Friday tomorrow. I’ve also put together a few other things to try to compensate for the month of income I missed in August. Apologies for putting out another clump of stuff all at once: if you can grab it all on the no-fee day tomorrow it would of course be very much appreciated, but everything will still be around after that if your finances are slim.
One of the new things offered tomorrow at the irr. Bandcamp site will be ‘A Darker Shade Of Fat’, the third plundering of my Nurse With Wound live recording archive. The first instance was of course the NWW album ‘Dark Fat’, followed by the outtake & extras irr./NWW collection ‘Dark Drippings’. The original ‘Fat’ was created to be part of a box set of NWW live-derived material, but Steve liked it enough that he wanted to give it a solo release; at that time, the box set was still going to happen, so I started work on some new material to replace the missing ‘Fat’. That is the provenance of these ‘Shade’ tracks. The idea for the box set gently evaporated, so I never needed to completely finish the replacement tracks, and they have languished in their penultimate state for the past 3 years. While looking for something very-nearly-done that I could get ready in time for the 4th, this project immediately came to mind. Just as the cover of ‘Dark Drippings’ was a spin on Steve’s collage for the ‘Dark Fat’ CD cover, the cover for ‘Shade’ is a spin on his collage for the DF vinyl set.
Another item scheduled for tomorrow will be a brandeloquenly-newified album called ‘Nocturnal Emissaries: An Audio Inquiry In Seven Secretions’. This material is an exploration in taking studio improvisation, nudging it part-way into textural abstraction, and then basting the results in a viscous, atmospheric gravy. Intended for the nourishment all sentient beings everywhere, but probably to the taste of only a modest few.
A third item is in preparation, but, if I manage to finish it in time, I’ll post about that when I send out all the links tomorrow.
I imagine you’re probably getting a little tired of the deluge of new releases every month on these Bandcamp First Friday events… but this is the last one on the schedule, so — except for the monthly single — I’ll be easing back on new releases for a while. The support many of you have shown on these no-fee days has been a huge help, and it is greatly appreciated.
For this final event, I’ve prepared three new releases:
Next, the third installment in my ongoing salvage & reissue series, the never-quite properly released sixth irr. album from 2001 ‘Radiant Black Future‘. New graphics, the original graphics, the original album text and extensive new liner notes are all included.
(new 2020 cover image)
(original 2001 cover image)
Finally, a surprise reissue of an unreleased 1999 project called ‘‘Patapheromone‘, which I had more-or-less forgotten about. I came across the raw materials for it while hunting down some missing sources for ‘Radiant’. Parts of this album ended up scattered amongst a few other albums from the period, but they exist in a substantially different context here, and much of the material was never used. Full details are in the album notes.
I still have a couple more unreleased albums to get to — ‘Not Hidden, But Concealed’ from 2000 and ‘Vulgar Probabilities’ from 2011 — but I won’t be forcing them on the public on a monthly schedule anymore. When those are finished, I’ll move on to restoring ‘An Uncertain Animal’, ‘Dust Pincher Appliances’ and ‘Ozeanische Gefühle’; that will take care of all the pre-2001 obsolete technology releases.
As promised, a new irr. album has been posted to the irr. Bandcamp site. All proceeds that I receive from ‘Foraging For Daylight’ will be donated to Black Lives Matter. Today only, Bandcamp is donating its part of the revenue share to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
The download includes the 40-minute title track, plus an 18-minute bonus piece condensing together some of the more atmospheric elements from the title track.
I’m still hoping to get the reissue of ‘Radiant Black Future’ ready in time for the next BC no-fee day on July 3rd. More news as it happens.
On June 19th, Bandcamp will be donating all of it’s sales share to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. To coincide with this, I’ll be releasing a newly-recorded irr. album ‘Foraging For Daylight’ and will donate all of the proceeds to Black Lives Matter. I’ll periodically post the date & amount of the donations on the album page. The listing should be active around 1 or 2 am tonight, and I’ll post a link when it’s up.
After some bizarre technical problems from many different directions, the reissue/reconstruction of ‘Foreign Matter, Nor Frequency Carrier’ is now available here. Another 20-year exile back in the homeland. I ended up staying up all night and straight through the morning trying to sort this out, so now I’ll try to get some sleep at 1:00 in the afternoon…
The May installment of ‘Vesicular Distributor’ is also ready for action! Today is another Bandcamp fee holiday, so please grab one of these if you’re able…
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.
