27. Gonna leave this cruel world...
How many times have you heard someone say
"If I only had money, I would do things my way"?
But little do they know how rare it's to find
One rich man in ten with a satisfied mind
Satisfied Mind (1955)
Here is a brief update on some of my recent musical activities.
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I decided at the end of May (2023) to revive the dark Gothic-Industrial solo side-project I had originated in 2018, This Dark Shroud, as mentioned a few times earlier in this essay/book, recording and arranging a short, very beat-heavy electronica EP of 24 minutes that grew into a 10 track, 45 minute-long LP entitled "Vanity." The LP is now available on all major streaming services under the artist name “This Dark Shroud,” and the video I recently created for the title track is below.
Initially I had created a second LP called “Fleshy Air," with a red jacket, but then, even more recently (it is now July as I again update this section), after rearranging some of the things on that LP and also doing new versions of "Black Nail" and "The Dial Is in the Bathroom," as well as "What They Did,” I reentitled the LP. (It now also now includes an electronica-style cover version of IAMX's "North Star," as well as a cover of How To Destroy Angels’ "A Drowning.")
I performed as This Dark Shroud (solo) for the first time since 2018 on June 14, and for the first time ever in Tokyo, and earlier this month I did a "one-man" solo performance as TDS as well, though, not surprisingly, the crowd was rather small, and half of the people who had come for it left between the two sets I had prepared, so I ended up performing a shortened "second stage" to, essentially, two kindly friends and the soundperson. (Tonight, July 21, I will perform as TDS at Kichijoji NEPO using video projections, by the bye. I do not expect a large turnout, but it really isn’t the point for me anymore.)
I eventually ended up doing a new video for this year's version of Broken Glass, called "Brknglss" on the LP. On the evening of what had been Father’s Day, I went out to get some dinner and, as I was returning to my apartment in the rain, I had an image of the line that goes "You're crying again" (note that, in the original recording of "Broken Glass" from 2018, it was "Crying like a babe"). I decided that once I got back to my room I would scour the web for free-to-use footage of people crying, and that is what I did, putting most of the clips I had found into stark black and white and trimming the images to emphasize the eyes of the crying people, rather than their faces entire. In the latter portion of the video, I blended in some of my own footage.
I also recently made a new video for the new version of "Black Nail" that will appear on the forthcoming TDS LP, which, by the way, is entitled "9," as it now has nine tracks (it runs for a total of 50 minutes). I took sections of the original Black Nail video my bassist J and I had filmed back in 2018, cut, reeffectorized, and reshuffled the parts, and in many cases I slowed the video down and/or ran the forward parts in reverse, with the "reverse" parts from the original, then, now running forward... I did all this against the slightly faded backdrop of the album cover for the LP "9." This was followed by an updated video for “The Dial Is in the Bathroom,” which I will also share below.
Another update I would like to make here, and this is currently available only via YouTube in audio-only format (each individual track was too long to upload to BandCamp), one can now imbibe a three-part series entitled "A Glass Sun: Bricolages (2017-19)," consisting of three "suites" of roughly one hour each that combine older recordings I had found either on my HD or in iCloud, with tracks fading in/out and/or flowing into each other, and with some parts mixed or blended together in new ways, overlapped and/or edited/reedited, etc., to create a sort of storyline/sound collage of my past life/lives from my Fukuoka days. The work, as mentioned above, is subtitled "Bricolages: 2017-19," which I felt appropriate for what they are: collages, tapestries, a sort of DJ playlist for a ghost radio broadcast, broadcasting past sounds in a way that feels fresh and new. The styles found here are pretty much all styles I had been working in post-band/post-label (2017~) up through pre-pandemic times (late 2019); in other words, solo material made prior to 2020's "Untitled." There are some songs or parts of songs that were originally recorded as This Dark Shroud (solo) here as well, by the bye, and the second and third parts include some guitar and/or acoustic (vocal) material, some of which I excerpted, "remixed" and/or reedited as separate tracks, and compiled in their (sometimes slightly changed) forms on a compilation called "Revisited," which also includes the version of "Coda" I recorded on the day I did the "Man & Machine" sessions, along with version of "Coda" I'd recorded back in around 2018.
My latest release is “Solitude.” It is available for preorder at my BandCamp page, and will be released via streaming services soon.
I created a video for the LP’s experimental opening track, which I will share below. Much of the LP is quiet, and there are three piano pieces included, one original and two covers, one of which is Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Solitude.”
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Earlier in this essay, I had said that there were a number of unpublished fiction writings on an old computer HD that I could not access, due to a lost password, and that this collection of older writings included a couple of novel-length works. Well, lo and behold, very late on the night of Sunday, June 4, whilst cleaning my apartment from "head to toe" (I started early in the morning and finished at around 1 a.m. -- this activity was mainly started because a bed was delivered to my room at around noon on that day, the first bed I have ever owned, literally, as a single man!), a small black USB drive fell from what must have been some other galaxy almost directly into the palm of my hands.
Seriously.
When I looked at the contents on the drive the following morning (Monday, June 5) via my MacBook computer, I discovered that I had saved every single (or, at least, by the looks of it, nearly every single) piece of worthwhile fiction writing I had ever done starting in 2004, the year I finished my first M.A. degree in Japanese Literature at University of Colorado, all the way on up through 2011, one year after graduating Brown University with an MFA in Creative Writing, and also my first year living and teaching literature in Fukuoka at university (to put this further into context, 2011 was a mere two years before I had had that first meeting with the guitarist of what would become the band Chattering Man; speaking of...there was a short story I later discovered/ rediscovered in the 2011 folder on the USB drive entitled "Chattering Man," though the theme of the story had/has absolutely nothing to do with music or with the band, which hadn't in fact yet existed at the time I wrote it*).
I had thought all of this stuff was gone, possibly forever, locked away in a vault to which I no longer held the key.
I was wrong about that.
And so, while it is true that "Nothing lasts forever," everything eventually comes back around in its turn.
After all, I never would have imagined I would again be recording and performing as This Dark Shroud.
* Perhaps I will add that piece, below, in the addendum! I also have some other short-short fictions that later became songs from around that time, such as "City of Masks" and "Phantom," by the bye.
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