Music For Sad Robots : Just Some Harmless Self Promotion

I’m taking a little break from talking about the art of others today and am going to share something about my own art endeavors. I do talk about making art quite a bit, and the benefits of being creative in your own life. But today I’m actually sharing a bit of the fruit of my creative labors.

Yesterday I finished this music project I’ve been working on over the summer. New Psychedelics For Old : Vol One is ready for consumption. It’s an instrumental album made with a small analog synthesizer, a digital keyboard, and a 4-track cassette recorder. I mixed the analog stuff to a digital recorder, then mastered the songs on my computer. Pretty lo-fi setup. Because I’m lo-fi and sort of a luddite when it comes to modern recording techniques. I still use the same standalone digital recorder I bought in 2002. It’s just easier for me. I’m used to the tactile feel of moving faders. Sure its’ a pain in the ass because there’s not even a USB port on this thing, so in order to get all the songs off of this I have to burn them to a CD-R on the onboard CD-ROM drive. Once again, it’s a pain but my primitive brain is used to it.

Anyways, the album.

This started out with me wanting to just create in the moment and build a sound world that was visceral. I wanted these pieces to be moods. There’s no narrative or imagined movie that I’m scoring in my brain. I just wanted to convey where my brain was at in those moments; fear, confusion, contentment, sadness, melancholy,…you know, being a parent and at the point of parenthood where you’re starting to feel insignificant in the world of your children. Fun stuff.

The title is one I’ve been toying with for a year or so now. It’s a song I wrote that was written on guitar and with lyrics. It may appear on Vol Two, but for now it felt like the perfect title for this project. In my mind it’s this pursuit to find something that makes your imagination burn bright when the old tricks stop working. You’re trading in the old ways for something new. A new trip to get your brain blazing again and the imagination coasting. When the old drugs lose their affect, it’s time to find a new fuel for that technicolor trip.

When I was about five songs into this project I was thinking this was my Boards of Canada album, but there’s not enough drums on this to be Boards of Canada. Definitely the spirit of this album is fueled by the BoC aesthetic. Vol Two might be more beat-driven. We’ll see. To be honest, I’m not completely sure what was the driving force inspirational-wise. Not one artist was used as a blueprint. It’s just my own broken down brand of electronic music.

Music for sad robots, I guess.

The song I’m releasing today is titled “I Can’t Remember Why I Care”, and a lot of this is very much in the vein of memory and dreams and that world between the conscious and subconscious. I’ve always been fascinated with dreams, the subconscious, and what sort of things our dreams reveal to us. Even the strangest of our dreams have a pinch of reality and our emotional world in them. Though maybe not everything we dream are products of our own experiences, it’s at least a filter through ourselves and how we perceive what we’ve seen in our waking lives.

So please give the song a listen, if you like. I won’t make you listen if you don’t want to, but you will have to return the party hat and piece of complimentary cake I handed out at the beginning if you won’t even press the play button. The album in full will be coming soon. Possibly next week. Album art is still pending. I’m doing that, too. I’m quite enjoying all of this making and creating and weekend coloring, gluing, and pasting. Hope you do, too.

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