14. "The World Was Not the Same" + compilations...
The last "new" LP I completed in 2022 was a double-length release including both newer tracks and rearranged things I'd done, entitled "The World Was Not the Same," the title my adaptation of a quote from Oppenheimer's famous speech about the development of the Atomic bomb. (As an aside, this year Hollywood has been advertising their version of the story, directed by Christopher Nolan, the Batman guy, but this was before I even knew about the existence of the film version, and so, of course, I had not and, at the time of writing this, have not yet seen the film. If anything, I remembered the audio from Ryuichi Sakamoto's 1999 opera called "Life," where he used the Oppenheimer sample in a cut-up fashion during one part of the musical, which I saw performed live in Osaka during that year, the same year I had just gotten myself married before starting graduate school.)
The LP consists primarily of remixes of past work I'd rediscovered on the hard drive of my old laptop and some newer things too, including a new acoustic version of Bowie's "Lazarus," a new cover/radical reinterpretation of "Heat" from "The Next Day," with a few verses of "Heathen" thrown in for good measure, some in-studio "live" recordings, including a drum solo with electronic backing tracks, and a new version of "Inner States of Mind," with improvised guitar; it includes a couple of dark ambient soundscapes as well, the longest of which has at its center a lengthy spoken word sample taken from a talk I did for my YouTube channel about pain and the body. (I discuss this release in detail in my 2022 documentary "Evolution.")
"Inside" music video (self-shot)
"Ashes (of the Past)" music video
[Read a rather thorough review of the LP here.]
Between the time I released the above "Symphonies" series and this final 2x-length LP last year, I also released a number of compilations, remixes, and so on, as I had indicated earlier, including a large swathe of material from previous years. One such compilation, which featured a new mix/version of "Contaminated," for which I recorded a new electric guitar part, a new piano part, as well as a completely new vocal recording (with slightly-altered lyrics), was entitled "Past Life." The compilation LP also included a new mix of "Chaos" (a remix of the electronic version that was used in the original 2018 video), "The Dial Is in the Bathroom," and "Red Signals" from the Laughing Moon project (originally recorded back in 2017, with J and T from that project on bass and guitar, respectively). I also decided to include an acoustic song I'd written and recorded in 2018 on the compilation, a song called "The Ties That Bind," a sort of love song, albeit lyrically a precarious and uncertain one. For the version included on "Past Life," I added a new vocal line atop the one I'd previously recorded, making it, in essence, a duet between my current and former selves. Further, I made videos for some of these tracks, most notably for the new version of "Contaminated," which shows the PLA in action, in the air and on the ground, juxtaposed with footage from Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan earlier in the year.
"Red Signals" (w/Laughing Moon c. 2017) - 2022 Mix
Another compilation I released, after sifting through many hours of vault material and deciding on a suitable track listing, and it took me quite a bit longer to settle on than I'd initially anticipated, was the "Reincarnations" two part series (released separately as "Reincarnations" and "Reincarnations II"), a total of 30 tracks in total. There were also two Bowie tribute LPs: The first featured a brand new recording of “Five Years” -- presented in three mixes: one the full version, with both vocals and acoustic kit that I’d recorded at my friend’s studio, one drumless, and one instrumental, with only backing vocals -- as well as a number of other covers I had done in previous years, including some Bowie Berlin-era instrumentals, as well as new or different mixes of things I’d recorded for the “I’m a Blackstar” LP, along with a new cover of “Sunday,” from 2002’s “Heathen” LP. The second tribute LP was a compilation of all of the other leftover Bowie covers I had done but not published, starting chronologically with “Space Oddity” from ‘69 and moving through to the final track, “Where Are We Now?” from 2013’s “The Next Day.”
Further, there would be more (original) compilations to follow, right up to the very end of 2022, such as "In the Meadow," a collection of songs that included a new ambient mix of my original "electronica ballad" from 2018, "Only Three," a piano/vocal-only solo "cover" version of a friend's (Sunny's) song I'd re-entitled "Upside Down," (the original version had been called "Blackbird," which I'd thought might confuse listeners into expecting a cover of The Beatles' classic song, which this was certainly not), as well as a handful of other "vaults tracks" I had still wanted to release that hadn't been included on either "Reincarnations" or "Past Life." On the final day of the year, December 31, I also released a mostly instrumental/dark ambient collection entitled "The Day Before," which featured one new instrumental track (the title track) and other things I'd done that were mostly from previous years. The compilation also included one very recent track -- "Omicron," from 2022's "The Way Out Is In" -- here for the first time appearing alongside its even darker cousin, "Covid," from 2020's "Untitled" album. I also last year recorded a new version of “Hallelujah” and “Forget Her,” a Jeff Buckley original, and released them, along with an earlier recording of “Hallelujah” and some other Buckley covers, on an EP marking 25 years since his death-by-drowning in 1997.
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