21. “The past is the past, the future is new...”

This is a line from a song of mine called "Days Gone By" from 2018, by the bye. It jumped into my head while writing this, though actually the lyric is itself a reference to trying to move on from my old band, and so has nothing directly to do with 2023. (Edit: I very recently revived this song, in a remixed form, so now it does have something quite directly to do with this year's music, strangely enough. How fitting!)

Anyway...

At the end of 2022, my desktop computer started acting up.

It had acted up before, and I'd deleted all of the contents, rebooted, and continued using it without a problem.

Now, it was acting up again.

I decided that, after deleting everything on the HD and putting it back to "factory settings," again, this time I would buy a new computer (a laptop, the one I am on now -- it had been three years since I'd bought the desktop computer, and the first one had crashed so many times Apple had had to replace it, the replacement now, again, acting up...) and retire the desktop for good, which, in fact, is exactly what I ended up doing, finally.

Before doing so, however, and after having ordered the new one "custom" online, and then having had to wait until the beginning of the new year for it to be delivered (it ended up arriving on January 2nd, 2023, which was pretty cool, though I had secretly hoped that it would instead arrive on the 1st, since that would have been even cooler...), I wanted to organize and back up some of the files on my older laptop, the one I'd been dipping into periodically to do all of those compilations and remixes that ended up on things I'd released last year, as I talked about in an earlier section of this essay you are now reading...

Anyway, as I was in the process of doing so, I recalled that I still had an old external HD, a slightly clunky black thing that I had socked away in a drawer somewhere, one that perhaps I could clear out and use to back up the data from my old laptop, instead of having to buy a new one. Someone had given it to me years ago, as I recalled, and I remembered that it had been given to me full of data, though I could not recall what the data was, exactly, nor who it was that had given it to me, or why, except that it must have been something band/music-related (I thought that maybe it was stuff from my first band, Chattering Man, but this turned out to be incorrect, as will soon be divulged). And so, digging it out of a drawer, I connected the old device via the USB drive of my old laptop computer, opened up the blue folders that lay within, and there I found both video and audio files for two complete shows (and a third, though in audio format only) from way back in 2016 of me and "my band," that fragile reptilian unit, the one and only (drumroll, please)... Glass Gecko!

How now to describe the feelings I experienced as I reviewed (as well as re-viewed) the videos here in my Tokyo apartment at the end of last year, not only many, many years after-the-fact, but also so many, many experiences later in my own life and development, both as an instrumentalist/composer/musician, but also as a human being (which I am, certified non-A.I., 100% flesh and bone and blood, too, not to mention sweat, tears, creative impulse, etc.)... 

I vaguely recalled having watched these videos before, shortly after they were taken, but since, at the time, I was not at all proficient with transferring video data or doing my own editing and the like, as I am now, the files had ended up, post-breakup of the band, neglected and forgotten, lying dormant inside that old, clunky, plastic external hard drive. The reason I had all-but-forgotten about the videos now seems fairly obvious to me: 

After the breakup of the band that same year, and what must have been not long after I'd received the HD with this data -- the last of the shows that was on it (the audio-only show) was one that had happened fairly late in the game, if memory serves, not too long before we'd splintered into unequal parts (1 part solo me, 3 parts instrumental band them) -- I'd not only lost interest in the project, or then, literally, "ex-band/project," focusing, as I was, more and more on my own songs and developing my own style of solo performance, learning to do better and better home recordings on my own, first via GarageBand and later LOGIC PRO X, etc., but also I was still, at the time (and, actually, for at least another year or so thereafter, particularly while their band was still active around town) feeling more than a little bit bruised and sensitive about the fact that they had, I felt, dumped me and reformed themselves as a trio, an "instrumental" trio, a mixture into which they had apparently, from time to time, allowed in a guest vocalist for performances, a friend of the bassist and drummer, one whom I knew, too, though not very well... They had reformed firstly without telling me, as I discussed early on in this essay, and then, I'd realized, after I had learned about their reformed three-piece unit, now with a new feline name, that "our" fans had followed them to their shows, and not to mine, or so that's what I'd told myself at the time, my emotions gaining the upper hand, clouding my ability to reason and to move on more quickly than I finally did after some time. (Just how many songs had I written about them [!] and about the breakup [!!] in late 2016/early '17... "Fragile Reptile," "Dog," even the lyrics to "Black Nail" were a reference to them, the "broken reptile," the "open sore...forevermore..." and so on. Fortunately, the lyrics to the latter were and remain somewhat indirect and abstract.)

Thinking about all this today, about the way I had been feeling at the time...indeed, to have watched those old videos then would not have been a very healthy activity for me to have engaged in, you see, so perhaps there was a subconscious, or at least semi-(sub)conscious reason I had forgotten about what was on this HD I had been given by...whom, again? Ah, yes, hadn't he been quite friendly with them even after the breakup of our band, my band (!), and hadn't he followed their band and not my solo career, etc. etc. ad nauseum!!! OK, OK, enough, you say! (Yes, I am being facetious, to make a point.) Well, indeed, this was my way of (100% negative) rationalization about all of this at the time, which is why I ended up rather miserable until I began to realize that I could just do my own thing and be happy doing it, without worrying any longer about the past or dwelling on it too much anymore.

Well, well, well. Bravo. Moving on now...shall we?

And so, getting back to my reactions c. 2022, i.e. the end of last year, whilst rewatching the old videos of my band that I'd all but completely forgotten existed.

Right. (Smooths the lapel of his collar...)

So, how I was feeling? Did it make me sad? depressed? nostalgic??

Not any of those things, actually.

On the one hand, I observed myself having certain thoughts such as, "Hmm, we weren't too bad together, really, and these arrangements aren't so bad, either." This was what I thought while watching the first of the two video performances, anyway, i.e. the earlier chronologically of the two videos, from a venue called "Buzz," which later went belly-up (the venue), though I in fact decidedly did not feel the same way about the songs/arrangements found on the second performance video, from later that year, which, performed at a larger venue (the same as where we'd done our debut, and the same livehouse where CM had also debuted, two years prior) was pure "Hey, look guys! We're a cool retro-yet-alternative post-'90s rock band with a retro '80's vibe and a really rad guitar player who plays fast guitar licks and does lots of long solos!" style amateur bravado. Also, I look really wanna-be-rockstar frontman in the second video, wearing eyeliner and moving on the stage awkwardly whilst playing some rather choppy rhythm guitar via the electric, obviously trying my damndest to keep up with the guitarist's faster-tempo, flashier rock arrangements of my originally quieter, or at least subtler, slower songs (the arrangements of which, as previously discussed, I had rather resented at the time). Pretty embarrassing to watch, but it was one stage in my development musically, an important one, in many ways, so I am now able to accept, if not fully embrace, it for what it was and what it is.

Other thoughts followed, as I viewed/listened to the performances, such as, "Ah, I'd forgotten about this song! I wrote this one, too, didn't I! Ha..." as there were some songs -- two songs in particular, both on the first video from our earlier show at Buzz, that I'd written and we'd arranged for the band, but which I have, to-date, never again attempted to (re)arrange/record and/or perform publicly again. Finally, when I reached as far as the encore portion of the first show (the one I liked/like), I had a thought that went something like, "I should really try to do something with this song again..."

The song I am referring to here is "My Friend," a piece I'd rerecorded in around 2017, shortly after I'd started using LOGIC and wanted to rerecord nearly all of the songs I'd earlier done versions of in GarageBand, though I had not again attempted to perform it in any form since around that time, and although it was, as I believed and still believe, a solid song which had, I thought, much potential if properly rearranged and played in a different style, one befitting of where I stood/stand, musically-speaking, "today."

And so, the very next day I picked up my classical guitar and recorded, rather casually, via the iPhone a video of myself in my room practicing the song, after I had gotten it into reasonably good shape play/arrangement-wise, a sort of "demo" for myself to refer to and possibly base a future (properly-recorded via LOGIC) recording on.

From this time, the idea for the first of the three LPs I would end up recording before my 50th birthday had begun percolating inside of me…

22. I’m gonna be a half-centenarian soon, so I'm gonna record something memorable for the sake of "posterity"…

I recorded an LP of some of my older acoustic songs, things from my "band days," one or two actually going back as far as Chattering Man times (such as "Phantom," which we'd performed live as a hard rock song, though the new version would be quiet, dark acoustic, with a bit of an improv in the middle section, with some organic noises to later be added...), all (re)arranged now in my current style of loose, semi-improvisational play, with me rapping my fingers or knuckles on the guitar's body, adding harmonics via the neck, etc., etc. The lyrics for the songs, too, naturally morphed a bit at times, though I used the lyrics I'd originally written as a referent for all of the older songs, songs such as "More," "Memento Mori," the aforementioned "My Friend," things I hadn't attempted in years, all in brand new arrangements and, eventually, recordings. 

This was the concept I had for the LP.

I would record this cycle of songs via LOGIC (with proper guitar/vocal separation) on my Ibanez acoustic, rather than using the smaller Guild guitar I'd been using for pretty much everything "acoustic" since I'd bought it used last year. (As an aside: It had been a real find, as it cost half what it would have cost me new, yet was in pristine condition when I bought it, softcase included. It has since become my go-to guitar.) I decided to use the Ibanez, in part, because I had been using it regularly back in '16 when I was doing Glass Gecko (on both of the videos I've mentioned I am playing the Telecaster, but when playing the acoustic with the band it would always be on the Ibanez). The second reason was that the Ibanez acoustic definitely has a bit more "resonance" than the smaller, sweeter-sounding Guild (perhaps my former bassist from Chattering Man had been right about this, in retrospect, though my first Yamaha acoustic had been too large!). For "My Friend," as in the video rehearsal, I went with the classical, which has a softer, rounder sound, with its nylon strings...

Before recording each of the individual songs for the LP, one very cold winter's day early in January of the new year, while still on vacation from teaching, I sat down with the Ibanez and a blanket on my lap (literally, as it was very cold!), along with my trusty ol' USB recording mic and new MacBook laptop computer, and performed in my room a very long improvisation for guitar and voice, on which I not only played parts of various songs from my past, as I remembered them, in unbroken succession (and in real-time), but also I added, during the guitar improvs, some spoken word, completely on-the-spot, talking about the subject of being about to turn 50, about music and so on, both in English and, at one point, also in Japanese. The full improvisation ran for about 18 minutes, and after I mixed the entire thing (effectorizing the vocals at times when singing, and adding some quiet "noise" in the background throughout, which was actually the sound of my small space heater, recorded separately and with a bit of distortion later added for effect), I decided to split it into two separate parts, which on the LP are spread out, with all of the other album's tracks coming between them, apart from the opener (More) and closer (Phantom).

This LP could have been an all-acoustic "let's take a walk through nostalgia-lane, 'cuz I'm turnin' 50 now!" type thing, but, well, acoustic music, and these types of singer-songwriter numbers, are in fact only one small facet of the styles of music I do and have been doing over the years. Even acknowledging the new styles in which the earlier pieces were performed, looser and with tapping, etc., and that the improv/medley itself was something rather new for me at the time, too (I say "at the time" meaning that after the first one, included on this album, I later recorded a number of others as well, both in my room and eventually live, with guitar/vocals performed simultaneously and no other "overdubs"), I still wanted to include something more "electronic" on the LP as well, as a contrast to the acoustic work, and also because such a composition or compositions would also be "new tracks" (instead of rearranged songs from my past) and would give the LP tonal variety. 

My most recent project at the time (this past January) was "Kether to Malkuth," which was, for all intents and purposes, a Bowie tribute and an LP of so-called "covers," albeit radically reinterpreted covers. However, the thing was, the long middle section of "Kether to Malkuth" (i.e. the track) was essentially an original ambient soundscape I'd composed which, I thought, if extracted, could also work as a new, autonomous track. And so, I later remixed this section after performing a bit of "LOGIC X surgery" on it, and changed the ending completely, adding beats and noise via my Kaossilator synth pad before retitling it "Da'at," a reference to another of the "stations" of the mystical Kabbalah, and so also linking it with the Bowie tribute album in a somewhat subtle way. 

As for my version of "Word On a Wing," as earlier explained, it had started out as essentially an improvisation I had done on the keyboard (my Yamaha MX49, which I have been using since 2017's Laughing Moon project, by the bye), including both the underlying synth and the piano part I played atop it. I had an idea whilst commuting to classes on the train one day to remove the vocals from it entirely and see what it sounded like. When I tried this a day or two later, the track, I found, worked quite well, and in fact had basically zero resemblance to Bowie's version of "Word On a Wing," apart from the very first few opening notes, essentially a few bars' worth of single notes played on the piano, which I'd intentionally performed in the same way as on the original song, in homage. Otherwise, this was my track entirely, a new and original synth/piano piece that was also quite ambient. I retitled it "Scheme of Things," a lyric lifted from "Word On a Wing," referencing the tribute (as with "Da'at"), while also giving the track its own, original title.

And so, there I had my new album: rearranged acoustic songs from '15-'16, the long medley/spoken word, split into two separate parts, and these two longer instrumental/ambient selections which also indirectly made reference to my recent Bowie tribute.

What to call the LP? What sort of cover art to use? These were the main questions that remained for me to decide...

The original title I came up with for the LP was simply "0226," as in 2-26, or Feb. 26. I later added "23" to the string of numbers, making the official title "022623," since this year's birthday was "the big 5-0," and "0226" was "just" my birthdate, and could have referred to any other year equally. For the jacket, I used a photo I'd recently taken of myself outdoors, wearing a black hat that covers my eyes, my face unshaven and rough. The photo, on the jacket, is in black and white. One thing I haven't yet mentioned is that I sang both "Memento Mori" (or an extract of it, at the opening of the longer medley, which I entitled "A Memento Mori") and "More" (in full) on the new LP -- both are really old songs, written around 2015/early 2016 -- in a Leonard Cohen-esque half-sung, half-spoken lower-register voice (for me, though not nearly as low as Cohen's baritone!), as the photo I planned to use as the cover somehow had reminded me of him and his legacy. (RIP, Leonard.)