Putting the Music Aside, Mercifuly
Most people will tell you that when you’re doing something like mixing music and it’s not making sense, you just need to step away for a while. I’m doing the same thing.
After spending 32 days in January — I started a day early — making 32 tracks, I’ve made the decision to not listen for a month. The idea is to come back later and figure out what actually gets released. I’ve already released eight songs for the 2024 version m, and I plan to do about the same again.
There’s a problem in that the songs are so short, but I’ll worry about that later. Maybe there’s more than eight. Overall I tend to cut past where I should. If it feels like twelve works, I’ll cut at eight.
Cut deep. Make it hurt.
All of this is to say that I did the break thing last year, but it went a little longer than I thought. I’m just now getting around to releasing that material. Since I have a big backlog of music and I’m not listening — and I can’t work on last month’s tracks — I’m working on last year’s tracks and preparing a release.
I’ve got eight songs identified, and having really not listened to them in a long time, I learned a few things.
For 2025 I went out on a limb and tried dub techno. I’d describe it as dub-techno-influenced electronica, mostly so nobody can yell at me about it not being real dub techno. But it’s very reasonably close.
The songs are all just below ten minutes, and I really enjoyed listening through. I originally broke it down to sixteen tracks, then cut to the classic eight, and I’m really happy with the results — so much so that I’m kind of wondering how I did it and what the different strategies were.
There were some things I tried that didn’t work. There were other things that, when I tried them, kind of always worked, if that makes sense. The cool thing about dub techno is you really don’t need that much movement. It’s a feel. It’s an atmosphere. You go with it. You add and subtract things until you’re done adding and subtracting things, and then you fade out.
I’m really happy with the sounds and the overall feel of the whole thing. I’m preparing a cassette release right now and will for sure have the digital release out by the last day of the month.
That’s when I am doing the actual releasing now — regardless of the day — it’s just going to be the last day of the month.
And this one is a surprise drop. I’ll talk about it here, but otherwise I’ll probably do a week’s worth of blabbering about it on social media and then be done.
I do think early 2025 JD was onto something, and this could even be a solution to a table beata set up that I hadn’t considered. Having not done a review listenen, I kind of beat myself over last January not working. But it worked like a mother!