Second is the second installment of the ‘Isolation Fragments’ series. The post includes the original 22-minute version plus the 6-ish minute version edited for use as the video soundtrack. The video can be found on my YouTube channel here.
I’m really pleased with this particular batch! I really enjoyed making all of these. There are a couple more ongoing projects that I couldn’t manage to finish in time, but I should have those ready in tandem with the next Frogtown single.
I’ll make this quick, since I yet again had to pull an all-nighter to get things ready in time for Bandcamp’s fee-less Friday. I really need to find a way to manage my time better!
The first installment of the new Monthly Digital Single is now available! This year’s series is called ‘Legends of Frogtown’, and was inspired by a project I started last year, documenting the incredible variety of colours & patterns of the frogs that live in the Rock Creek Tributary (I’ve been intermittently posting some of them on my Instagram page). Every month I’ll be posting 3 tracks to accompany 3 of my frog portraits. The series is off to a pretty good start, I think. I’m approaching this year’s MDS differently from last year’s: I’m trying to avoid using any of my sound processing tricks and instead am just using the computer to capture performances done in the studio with whatever equipment & materials I have on hand.
Also available is ‘Isolation Fragments 2021-01-26‘ the soundtrack to a spontaneous video project I made at the end of January. It’s a very simple video — just editing together different images of snowfall in the Rock Creek Tributary — but it was a good excuse to motivate myself to start developing some basic video editing skills. The full version of the soundtrack and the mix/edit made for the video are both included. The video itself can be found on my YouTube page.
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’.
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!
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