In June of 2020, Lee Rosevere and I put out an album called "Harmony." In this release, Lee and I each drew simple sketches using the on-line drawing site Harmony, by software creator Mr Doob. Then each of us created musical pieces based on the other's drawings. I've been an admirer of Lee's varied musical stylings for years, and had a great deal of fun working on this project. The result is released on Bandcamp at Harmony

This month I am pleased to announce that the weareallghosts netabel released my new collection of pieces entitled "Seclusion."  These pieces were created during the covid-19 novel coronavirus crisis. The pieces themselves are less novel in approach, but instead reflect my twin attractions to simple, offbeat lullaby melodies and to assorted dissonant interruptions in otherwise conventional ambient pieces.

The creation of the pieces involved a can-jo, root beer bottles filled with water to create wind instruments, offbeat free software and a dollop of Audacity. I am wary of the word "experimental" as applied to any musical idea after the variety of thousands of years of human civilization and perhaps millions of years of musical creation. I prefer instead to see what I do as a combination of gameplay, of novelty song, and of deadly serious expression of whim. That, after all, is as close to a credo as the genre "weirdbient" can bear.

The album is available for free at Archive.org. I released it Creative Commons BY NC. I prefer to release things BY, but I added the prohibition against non-commercial uses just to avoid having to issue takedown notices to folks who post things as their own instead of honoring the BY designation. But my heart is with simple attribution--the good old BY.  Here are the pieces themselves:




The album is also on sale on a pay-what-you-will at bandcamp.com.

My thanks to Thomas Mathie of weareallghosts for releasing the album, and for the grand album cover design.

Ace Texan film-maker (now in Iowa) Julianna Villarosa gave her friends some 16mm footage and invited them to make something with it. Then she added all the micro-films together. The resulting film is called:

Friendfilm

Julianna included my song "Small Pond" as part of the soundtrack about 45 seconds in. It's fun to be part of something friendly and a bit more extensive than one's own efforts. 

Australian film-maker Marie Craven used my music, likably remixed a bit, in her video "Endless Wall to Wall Carpet", which is a response to a poem by Anne Cotten. I am pleased to learn that her film was accepted to the 2018 Zebra Poetry Film Festival.


Endless wall to wall carpet from Marie Craven on Vimeo.

I enjoy Marie's work, and am delighted to appear in her film.

Video-maker Monique Smulders created this excellent video entitled "Small Pond/een vijvertje", which features my song "Small Pond" as its soundtrack. I like her work--and am pleased to share it here:

Today is Netlabel Day 2018. I am pleased that my track "Rainy Day Inside" is one of the tracks on the Cerebral Rift netlabel compilation "Into the Rift, Volume 3: From Genial Times".

It's a download here:

Into the Rift v. 3

I am pleased that three of my pieces appear on the release "Double Blindfold Project" on the Cerebral Audio netlabel.

In this project, I created one piece, "Surgery".  Then I was sent anonymized samples by the artist Delicasession to create a second piece, "Words Left Unsaid (re-imagined Delicasession)".  Then I was sent a further set of anonymized samples to create "Distant Festival".

I enjoyed the process of creation, though with hindsight I wish that I had had more fun with the samples that I used to create "Distant Festival". I went for the raucous blend, when perhaps I should have used a scalpel for the subtle tone instead.

The release is available here:
Double Blindfold project