The Imperfect / Apr.06.2024

“We are prisoners of the present, forever transitioning between our inaccessible past and our unknowable future.” - Neil deGrasse Tyson

before i get started here… most of you may have heard that we lost our dear Sawako on March 31st. I’m still trying to sort this out in my head. i hope that any of you who knew her will spend some time in the coming days with her music, or perhaps share some stories or photos with your friends. for those of you who didn’t know her work please give it some listens. she will be missed and tokyo will feel empty without her there.

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On Friday, April 05, the pre-orders opened for a new project i have completed with Joseph Branciforte called Sti.ll. It is an acoustic reimagining of my 2002 album Stil.

i’ll leave a link here for info on the project. it was intense, immense, time consuming and incredibly rewarding.

Sti.ll will see release on May 17th as a double LP via 12k, a hardcover folio via Greyfade and the digital/streaming version via Nettwerk.

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as i worked with Joe on Sti.ll i inevitably had to do a lot of listening and digging though archives of the original Stil. material, something i don’t often do with my older music. i was reminded, as i did this, that i had folders of unused sounds and even entire tracks that i created at that time which never made it onto the final album.

after some failed attempts to read these old CD-Rs (it took an older mac OS to be able to properly mount the discs) i was able to convert the old SD.2 sound files, copy over AIFFs, and rebuild the old sessions (to a point).

when i began to listen to the old sounds and un-arranged versions of the unused songs, i was surprised to hear how different most of them sounded to what made it onto the final record. Stil. is quite a melodic album, in its own strange way, and a lot of these discarded bits were quite atonal, very “clicks and cuts”, high frequency beeps and tones. I must have really narrowed in on the more melodic pieces to call an album, finding the others perhaps too close to what i had just released as Occur.

i would like to share a few of these unused sounds, all from the first half of 2002, my favorite ones, or at least the ones that feel more like the album, which also happened to be lengthier (a lot of the old sounds were quite short, intended to be looped perhaps).

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this first sound file was titled “beautiful stil segment” and is originally over 12 minutes long. i must have deemed it “beautiful” because it was slightly melodic, compared to most of the others. it definitely has some Stil. vibes to it. i have little idea what software or instruments this particular sound was made with.

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this one is called “glayer 01-19-02.” the fact that it has a “g” in front makes me think it was created with a nord modular g2. i believe i often noted these sounds this way. the date is fun to have, to know exactly the day i made it. it’s definitely a sound of the time. i probably felt it was too “rhythmic” to be a part of the album i was envisioning.

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this is “stil.looper 5.6" and it sounds to me very much like one of the sounds in the track “temper” or at least a variation of. the “.6” may indicate a different version. these extreme high frequencies and high/bandpass filtered sounds are indicative of the work i was either doing with the ancient audio software SoundMaker or the plug-in called Periscope by AudioEase.

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there are a lot more sounds i have rescued and there was actually one song, with the working title of “Stil 12-01.” this track actually sounds quite interesting to me and may be worth revisiting. it is noisy, digital and melodic and sounds like it was a close contender for inclusion on the final version of Stil. at a later date i may share the rough sounds of this piece and certainly if i decide to rebuild it i will share the progress.

but in the meantime, i find that the past is, sometimes accessible, even if fragmented.

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#SongOfTheDay Sawako “Looped Labyrinth, Decayed Voice”