Well, at long last, album #2 has been released.
My previous release, Fruit of the Steel Tree, was my best effort to realize the music that Walter and I wrote back in the 1990’s.
This new release, The Inevitable Obscenity of Autonomous Weaponry, includes a few tracks from that same period. I’ve perhaps taken more liberties with them this time, relying on my own vision.
The other tracks are all “new” in the sense that they are based on material I wrote since Walter and I stopped collaborating on music, from 2003 to 2019.
You can find out more at the album-specific pages I created (see the The Inevitable Obscenity link in the blog top menu above).
I used CD Baby as my manufacturer/distributer and due to COVID-19 related circumstances, I’m not sure exactly when and how this will be made available to purchase. It *should* appear on Amazon at some point, and although CD Baby has closed their online store, they do have copies in their warehouse for distribution.
The physical package is nice: an eco-sensitive cardboard wallet:
The artwork came out nicely but I acknowledge I used a sub-optimal font point size on the smallest text. It seemed ok in the PDF but I should have realized that white-on-black in print would be harder to read. Oh well, no big deal. The information (and more!) is all available online (see link above).
Digitally, the album is now up on Spotify and probably other streaming services as well. Yay!
Okay, so the timing for this release isn’t great: as I write this, we are still under a County Public Health “Stay At Home Order” due to the coronavirus pandemic, and the economy is taking a nose-dive. Folks just aren’t going to have the disposable income (or the will to spend it) that they did a couple months ago.
Originally I’d planned for this to be out in 2019 which would have been nice, but it didn’t happen.
Since the last blog post, “Final polishing” of the tracks took longer than expected because I kept finding little things I wasn’t totally happy with. This is actually an infinite process because there will *always* be things that I think I could improve, and my tastes change over time so it’s a moving target. The trick is to apply the law of diminishing returns and identify when it is time to Let It Go.
At this point, I think I chose appropriately. It’s out there now, anyway.
What’s Next
I’ve uploaded two videos on YouTube to accompany the release: A studio “play-through” for Paradigm Shift and a second one for Cathedral with “behind the scenes” text captions.
I intend to create a third video for The Toks Invade before putting the project to bed.
I’m going to be preparing a Bonus CD (well, EP maybe) with alternative versions of some of the tracks. I’ll make this available digitally via BandCamp, no physical CD for this.
Over the last couple of years I’ve been working on new lyrics and some musical ideas and it really does look like there will be an Album #3. But that’s for later.
I have been *Listen*ing to various mixes of "Listen" ever since _Cyberian Khatru: The Sounds of alt.music.yes_ … I even have an mp3 of some sort of intermediate mix of "Listen" that I downloaded from your webpage years ago, including *whale sounds* or something… ?? Anyway, I will be downloading your new album+bonus tracks tomorrow (7/3/2020) at Bandcamp, so hopefully you'll get more $$ from that.
(You sent me multiple submissions for _The Second Attention_ that were really great and, when I compiled it, I wanted to include all of them, but I limited it to one track per performer on that CD.)
Hi Mark, thank you so much for the comment, and for the purchase. I truly appreciate it. I still have the Cyberian Khatru CD but I confess that I am embarrassed to listen to that early version of "Listen". I hope the (finally!) released version lives up to that early promise.