The Vesicles Have All Been Distributed! And HNY!

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Hello all, and a very Happy New Year to you!

The final public installment of ‘Vesicular Distributor’ has now been posted. The bonus 13th installment has also been privately posted, and anyone who bought all 12 will be sent a code to get #13 for free. It’ll probably take a few days for me to get all the codes sorted. If you’re supposed to receive one and it hasn’t turned up after a week, please get in touch (irrappext@gmail.com) and let me know. Sometimes wires get crossed!

Panel #23
Panel #24
Panel #25 (from the bonus installment)

I’d originally planned for this series to have a total of 26 tracks + 26 panels — 2 of each per month plus 2 more for the bonus — but it’s turned out that I needed one more panel to wrap up the story properly. So the bonus installment now includes the 3 final narrative panels and 3 accompanying tracks (close to 25 minutes of extra audio).

So what’s in store for next year, you may or may not be asking? I’ll give you an answer regardless of which camp you’re in.

I am going to be doing another monthly single, as it’s proved to play a vital role in keeping my bills paid. The next one will be of a different nature, however. I do have some other narrative ideas in the works, but it takes time to get the text & visuals properly worked out, and I don’t feel up to jumping straight into another one without a break; so while I work out the next storyline, I’ll be posting a ‘Legends of Frogtown’ series every month, culled from the LOFT photo project I started this year. Each frog portrait will be accompanied by a track around 3 minutes long, with each month’s installment including 4 portraits & 4 tracks — so the total amount of audio will end up being approximately the same (the 2 tracks for ‘Vesicular Distributor’ were about 6 minutes long on average). The stylistic approach to the tracks will be very different from ‘Vesicular’, which I’ve taken about as far as I’m interested in going with it for the present. Here’s an example of one of the ‘Legends’ portraits if you haven’t already seen them on my Facebook or Instagram pages:

Aside from that, I’ve got a few more reissue/remasters lined up. The never-released album from 2011 ‘Vulgar Probabilities’ is next on the list. Ozeanische Gefühle will get a thorough scrubbing at some point. An older never-released (and never quite completed) album ‘Not Hidden But Concealed’ from way back in 2000 should be sorted out sometime next year. But I think after ‘Vulgar’, the next two reissues will probably be ‘Dust Pincher Appliances’ from 1999, and a deluxe reissue of the first irr. album ‘An Uncertain Animal’. It’d be nice to finally have all of the releases from the first phase of irr. public activity (1997-2001) fully cleaned up and made available to the world.

Several newer projects have been knocking around, and with luck I’ll find enough time to get some of those finished as well. ‘The Voice Of The Tiktaalik (Or, In The Sunshine Of Your Lungs)’, ‘Future Reveries Of The Eoarchaean Biomass, Volume 2’, ‘The Drowned Sisters Of Doggerland’, ‘All The Mystery Has Gone From The World’ and a couple others are in various stages of completion. A 4-way collaboration between myself, R K Faulhaber, Esperik Glare and Xambuca is waiting for my attention, and so is a collaboration with Recordist Overlord William Davison. And, of course, the essentially-completed-but-suspended-in-gaffa 2018 album ’10 Stations’ (of which some preview tracks have long been posted on the neglected irr. Soundcloud page) still needs to find it’s resolution.

That’s a lot, and there’s more as well, but it won’t all be coming out in a heap. That’s probably at least another 2-3 years’ worth of work, and I only hope I’ll have the good fortune to keep things going that long — and hopefully even longer.

Some of the original art listed in an older news post is still available! Take a look here: https://irrappext.com/2019/10/11/original-art-for-sale/ if you’re interested in that sort of thing.

I wish all the very best to all of you in the new year, stay healthy, happy & safe, and eternal thanks for all your support — particularly this past year!

much love,

–msw

Last Friday

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Hello all!

It’s the first Friday of the month, and once again I’m scrambling until the early hours of the morning to upload the new batch of offerings, get all the announcements sent out, and then hopefully get to bed before the sun comes up. Not too likely at this point, but the main work is done.

A big new batch has been posted to the irr, Bandcamp site! Not exactly the batch I had planned: I’d hoped to have ‘Vulgar Probabilities’ ready for this Fee-less Friday grouping, but I felt it needed some additional artwork and that takes time. Also, one of the new projects got a little out of hand and ended up splitting into three different releases.

The instigator of the trio of new albums is ‘Vacuous Truths‘, which was originally going to be more of a field-recording-based project, but mutated into something else (while still retaining a few of the underlying field recordings). As it mutated, it grew a couple of buds which shed off and became their own, individual entities.

The second album, ‘Reticulate Shifting‘, grew out of a series of looping experiments that were created for ‘Vacuous’; while some of them fit into areas of the original record, it became clear to me that some fertile territory was waiting to be explored. The album was ultimately compiled out of 93 different loops, many of which feature the handy & dandy electro-acoustic Ragebox constructed for me by Wm. Rage several years back. I’ve used the Ragebox on several other recordings, but it really comes into it’s own on this project.

It’s a lot of fun to find different ways of working with exclusively loop sources, so I’ll definitely be doing another in this series at some point. Keep an eye out for ‘Reticulate Shifting 2: Electric Boogaloop’.

The other little mutant spawn from ‘Vacuous’ is ‘A Trivial Idea Magnified Across Vast, Imaginary Distances‘, which is a little journey through an unsettled and unclear landscape.

All three albums include new text pieces and graphic panels, both included as bonus items with the download.

Of course, also included in the new batch is the penultimate episode of ‘Vesicular Distributor‘. Only one public installment left! And, if you weren’t aware, an additional installment of two tracks and the final two panels in the story will be available free to anyone who bought the full set of twelve installments.

A special addition to this batch is the long-unreleased collaborative album I made with French pianist Sylvie Walder. Sylvie contacted me in 2011, and, using her piano recordings as the centrepiece, I gradually developed these tracks over the next four years in-between the regular overseas travel for NWW that was happening at the time. The full album was completed in October 2015 and I tried to get a proper (possibly vinyl?) release through a label for years without any luck. So it’s time to get it out there the one way I know I can. I think it’s a great collaboration, and I’ve really enjoyed listening to it again.

In the interest of full transparency, I’ll admit that I haven’t been able to get in touch with Sylvie since 2017. I’d told her I would eventually post the album to Bandcamp if I couldn’t get any other option to work, but I did not expect at that time that I would have no way to communicate her when that came to pass. I went ahead with posting it anyways because there didn’t seem to be any point in leaving it on the shelf any longer. If anyone knows her and can let me know how to reach her, I would greatly appreciate it. I hope she’s ok! It’s a crazy world out there now.

I’m ready to fall over, so I’ll leave it there. Huge thanks to everyone for their support! Please grab some of these if can: it really helps a lot!

–msw

October Vesicles

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Hi all,

Just a quick mention that the October installment of Vesicular Distributor has been posted in time for this month’s fee-less Friday on Bandcamp. Perpetual thanks to all of you that have been supporting the monthly digital single and all the other downloads: it’s made an enormous difference in what would otherwise have been a pretty dire year.

I’d hoped to have a few other things available today, but I just couldn’t quite get them done. It’s 6 am now and I’ll have to admit defeat this time. They’ll have to wait for December.

I’ll end by mentioning that I’ve been invited by the big S to do a remix of Rock ‘N’ Roll Station, and I’m very excited about the guests who have agreed to contribute their voices to my version! It’s going to be a thing of beauty and astonishment when it’s all stitched together. I have no idea when or how the results will be released, though.

Hope all of you are holding up in these dubious times, and have uplifting projects & people to help you through it all. Give your alpaca a belly rub for me. Much love to you all.

–msw

September Vesicle Now Being Distributed

/ erratainexcelsis

Hello all,

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.

–msw

Many Thanks!

/ erratainexcelsis

Hi all,

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.

all the best to all the best,

–msw

HCA

/ erratainexcelsis

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…

HCA cvr

Thanks again… zzzzzzzz….

–msw

Darker Emissions & Shady Distribution

/ erratainexcelsis

Hi again,

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)

Vesicular Distributor 07a cvr

The August installment of Vesicular Distributor

Vesicular Distributor 08a cvr

The irr.-manipulation-of-NWW-live-sources album ‘A Darker Shade Of Fat’

A Darker Shade OF Fat cvr

The new irr. album ‘Nocturnal Emissaries’

Nocturnal Emissary cvr

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.

HCA cvr

Thanks to everyone for their continued support!

–msw

Back On The Mechanical Bull

/ erratainexcelsis

Hi All,

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.

Vesicular Distributor 08a cvr
Vesicular Distributor 08b cvr

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.

A Darker Shade OF Fat cvr

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.

All the best to everyone,

–msw

Radiant Black Friday

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Hello all:

 

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:

 

Firstly the ‘Vesicular Distributor’ monthly single for June.

 

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.

more soon,

–msw

Light’s Out

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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.

 

much love to everyone,

–msw