My World: A Retrospective (Part I: 2023-24)

Available now at My BandCamp Page (click to go to this release directly).

1. More
2. thereisalightinadarkdarkroom
3. BlkNailHrt
4. Silent Ones
5. Unsilent Ones
6. White Pearl ’23
7. Vanity (Decadent Mix)
8. Red Signals ’23
9. Palimpsest 001
10. Scratchkickplay
11. Symphony of Glass
12. A Liar ’24
13. Phantom ’24
14. Nietzsche’s Curse
15. Before and After Covid (No More to Say)

TRT: 78 mins.

Track 1: More

“More” was the very first original song I ever composed on the acoustic guitar, all the way back in the summer of 2015. I had only been playing the guitar for a couple of months at the time of composition, and so the first arrangement I’d done of it was rather basic, both in terms of the chords and arrangement. Although I eventually did other, slightly more complex arrangements (and re-recordings) of this song in the years prior to the current, rerecorded version of ’23 (including an alt. arrangement for piano and synth in 2018, to which I had also added beats in Logic [Pro X], the program I use for arranging and mixing/mastering all of my audio), I have rarely performed it live over the years. (This, by the way, stands in stark contrast to the second song I wrote on the acoustic, “Want,” which to this day I still perform regularly.) In any case, when I was deciding which songs I wanted to rearrange and to rerecord for what would become my “230226” LP ― an album including several such early songs I’d rearranged for acoustic and voice, and which was released on my 50th birthday (which was on 02/26/2023, hence the title of the LP, “230226,” since in Japan the year comes first, followed by the month and day) ― “More” seemed as appropriate a choice as any to revisit. 

As for the arrangement, this version is much looser than any of the much earlier recordings I’d done, though in fact I also intentionally performed and recorded it ― as with all of the other acoustic songs on this LP ― on my older Ibanez acoustic, the same guitar I’d used back in 2016 with my first band (by which I mean the first band I’d assembled [or formed, or brought together] myself, and also the first band I’d ever played guitar with, as I had only performed vocals [and some tambourine, to be fair!] in my previous band). It would have been a more obvious choice for me to record on the Guild acoustic, which was then as now my main go-to acoustic guitar. The Guild is, for one thing, smaller-bodied, so it easier-to-play (in addition to its compact size it also has better “action” which, in layman’s terms, means that there is a shorter distance between the strings and the fretboard, something anyone who plays acoustic or classical acoustic guitar, especially, will certainly appreciate). I wanted to record my older songs using my older guitar for obvious sentimental reasons, of course, but the other reason I used it for this LP was that, although it’s a bit twangy at times, especially as compared to the sharper-sounding, and also slightly higher-pitched Guild, the Ibanez has a decidedly larger body, and so the “resonance” is also a bit larger. 

In terms of the performance and mix, firstly I altered several of the lyrics from what they had originally been. I also added some “crowd noise” samples into the background during mixdown, and instead of singing the melody in what had been my standard higher-pitched, long-tone style found on all of the earlier recordings, I instead half-sang, half-spoke the opening verses in what I had considered or imagined to be an approximation of what a Leonard Cohen-esque “mature adult male” style of vocal might sound like coming from this old man’s lips just days prior to his half-centennial anniversary.

In any case, as this was the first song I had ever written on the acoustic in 2015 (at the time I was 42), I thought that opening the current retrospective compilation with this 2023 version of the song (as I write this I am currently aged 52, though when I recorded it I was 49 going on 50), too, would be an appropriate and meaningful choice.

Track 2: thereisalightinadarkdarkroom

This track appears on the follow-up to “230226,” a double-length LP entitled “Without Beginning or End.” Though the former LP featured two instrumental tracks I would perhaps call “ambient” or “electronic” if pushed to come up with a genre for them, the first LP of what would rapidly develop into a three-part series was primarily an acoustic/vocal album consisting mainly of rearranged and newly-recorded versions of songs I had written between 2015-16, as mentioned in the former entry, many of which I had also performed with my band at the time, though there were also several I had only  ever performed solo as well (“solo” here meaning what is termed “hikigatari” in Japanese, or, roughly translated, “play [the guitar, the piano, etc.] and tell a story [i.e. sing]” alone on a stage), i.e. without any full band arrangements and/or participation of any of the members. (“More” is one such piece, in fact, as we never arranged or performed it in the band, though it’s something I had occasionally performed solo even while also still performing other material live together with my then-band Glass Gecko.)

Contrary to the release preceding it, and getting back to a the track itself, the follow-up LP ― which featured several sprawling dark ambient instrumentals ― was made up of a number of experimental “bricolages,” or tracks containing elements from more than one other track/recording culled from my backcatalog of music. The present track is a good example of this, as it literally combines two different songs from my 2020 Covid-days LP unpretentiously (I think) entitled “Untitled.” The first track used was “There Is a Light,” the second “Room,” hence the derivative/mixed title of the present composition. 

I did not simply overlap the two tracks here when mixing, of course, but instead applied backwards effects in tandem with various other elements, thereby creating a distinct, rather experimental track that both references the original tracks from which it was derived yet also sounds quite different from either/both of them. Like “More,” this track also recalls music I had created in former times, and so once again it, too, seemed an appropriate selection to include here, coming off of what is a sprawling double-length LP (despite its very modest number of total tracks). Its rather reasonable length, as well, made it an ideal candidate for a retrospective such as the present compilation you are now perhaps listening to. If I had instead chosen, for instance, a track such as “Dark Current,” which itself runs for nearly 30 minutes, I would have had very little space left to share anything else!

Track 3: BlkNailHrt

The album following the lengthy, highly-experimental “Without Beginning or End” LP, which is entitled “Abstrackt Distracktions,” was completed perhaps only around 48 hours or so before I myself became, at last, a bona fide quinquagenarian (or, to put it in simpler jargon, I turned 50). In other words, I literally put the finishing touches on the LP in the “eleventh hour” and then quite stealthily/sneakily (how dare I?!) slipped it in as the third part of what I would end up referring to as my “2023 Triad,” a triptych/trilogy of rearranged acoustic songs (Part 1), abstract instrumentals (Parts 2 and 3), and several improvisations (Part 3) which, in essence, for me, anyway, would commemorate, both metaphorically and artistically, my first half-century of life as a certified (birth certificate: check; passport: check) human being on this dark planet that we, at least in the English-speaking world, generally refer to as “earth” (or, in some spiritual circles, “Mother Earth”). 

(Please understand… Firstly, I couldn’t do an all-star 50th birthday live performance at Madison Square Garden, as David Bowie did when he turned 50 in ’97 [for obvious reasons], and I also couldn’t afford a military parade held in my honor [I am not a member of that particular red hat-wearing four-letter-acronym club, anyway], and so I simply had to content myself, instead, with this rather weird trilogy of albums that maybe a few people might come to enjoy at some point in some alternative future, and which I had already myself started enjoying listening to as I slipped from being a forty-something-single-male into fifty-something-holy-shit-I-am-getting-old-single-male…)

Anyone who is familiar with my music, and especially if they have been following it from my early “post-band solo days” (all two of you! I know you’re out there somewhere, listening obsessively and unhealthily to everything I’ve ever created in my mental basement…), will surely be familiar with my original Industrial Rock-tinged song “Black Nail,” which I came up with the lyrics and vocal melody line for at the end of 2016; that is, before properly rearranging/rerecording the song in 2017 via Logic, the second time around with a proper “synth bass-line” added, as well as some sloppy piano glissandos…

The song “Black Nail,” by the bye, represents my earliest attempt at “Electronica,” much as “More” had marked my first-ever acoustic guitar-based solo composition. The version I have included here, which really isn’t the song “Black Nail” itself, but rather a sort of variant of it (this term makes it sound a bit like a virus, eh? “Omicron variant of Black Nail,” anyone??), or, if one prefers, perhaps even a kind of “homage” to it. This mix/version/variant has, as its “base,” a rather straightforward, beatless piano-vocal version I had recorded back in 2018 for an LP I had entitled “Always.” (*) This rather quiet, beatless piano-vocal version of “Black Nail,” so different from the original beat-heavy version with thick synth bass and banged-out piano notes, is here combined with, among other things, my solo cover version (also recorded in 2018) of NIN’s “Hurt” (a song originally recorded in 1994) for piano/voice, which comes in at the tail end of the track and also gives it its title. 

As a final aside, and to conclude the current entry for this track (not including, that is, the following lengthy footnote I have added to it), the “Abstrackt Distracktions” LP included not only the current version/variation of “Black Nail,” but also two other very short “Black Nail” variations: “BlkNailNoize” (which is, as the title implies, indeed rather noisy) and “BlkNailKa0s” (the latter which also includes elements of early mixes of the songs “Chaos” and “Burning Fire”). Other tracks on the six-track LP, which runs for a solid 70 minutes total, despite the shorter tracks, include two rather long (!) guitar-vocal improvs (one a medley, the other an improvisation with spoken word) and another even lengthier experimental instrumental, from which the LP itself derives its title.

(*) The 2018 album “Always” was originally to have been called simply “Piano,” but I was forced to change it due to my distributor’s ironclad rule about “not using the names of instruments” as titles of albums, and so therefore decided to use one of the song titles as the LP title instead, for lack of a better idea at the time (perhaps I might have called it “The Piano” and discovered a loophole in their system? A much more recent album from earlier this year that consists of piano compositions was called “Black Keys, White Keys,” but I hadn’t thought of this idea back in ’18, alas…). At any rate, I discuss the aforementioned song, “Always,” in more detail in the section about “White Pearl” (Track 6 of this compilation).

Track 4: Silent Ones

Please note that this track, “Silent Ones” ― which comes from the LP “1000 Lights” ― has absolutely nothing to do with the track that follows it, which is, coincidentally (but unrelatedly, as I’ve just said), entitled “Unsilent Ones.” However, their titles do, respectively, both have a story behind them…

“Silent Ones” was originally ― and this may seem surprising to some when listening to it, as it does not have a pop structure whatsoever ― part of a remix I had done that incorporated the vocal “stems” from two tracks from David Bowie’s 1999’s “hours…” LP that I had one day stumbled upon online. Rather than doing a dance mix of the Bowie, or trying to reconstruct the arrangement of the original instrumentation in any way, I instead opted for an alternative approach, which was to create my own ambient instrumental backdrop, one that was completely different from the instrumentation or melodic parts found on either of Bowie’s original “band versions” from the album. (*) I then added the original vocal parts I had plucked from online before adding a few of my own backing vocals to them as well.

However, I could not of course officially publish my remix, even if the backing music was 100% mine and did not resemble anything of Bowie’s original, as I did not own the rights to the vocal tracks themselves. (**) And so one day, midway during my process of arranging/mixing some new ambient-style material that would eventually end up appearing on the “1000 Lights” LP (e.g. “Runanubandha,” “Inner Peace,” etc.) I decided to see what taking Bowie’s vocals out of the mix would sound like, since the backing itself would essentially constitute a brand new original instrumental track that could be included ― without any copyright infringement concerns whatsoever ― on my next album. What resulted is what you have here, a track I thereupon reentitled “Silent Ones.” 

(Note that the title was taken from my whispered vocals at the very end of the track, the only vocal fragment from the fuller “backing vocal” overdubs I had added to the original remix I’d done that I’d decided, in the end, not to delete from this version.)

(*) The vocal stems came from the songs “The Dreamers” and “New Angels of Promise,” for those Bowie fans who are perhaps familiar with the original LP in question. Both of these were tracks that Bowie and Gabrels ― his then-lead guitarist and frequent co-songwriter, though Gabrels unfortunately decided to quit shortly after the “hours…” album was released ― had originally composed for an interactive video game called “Omikron: The Nomadic Soul” (note that the spelling was not “Omicron,” like the variant of Covid!). These two tracks, in particular, featured somewhat darker, less decidedly “pop” melody lines, arrangements, and also lyrics compared to the more wistful, acoustic-driven “Hunky Dory”-influenced songs that populate the first half (“A-side”) of the album.

(**) For anyone who may be interested, please note that I did eventually also release ― via my YouTube page, exclusively ― the Bowie remix version I’d done (with the backing heard here on “Silent Ones”), entitling my reconstructive re/mix “Dreamers & Angels.” This track can be found on my (let me repeat, once again, that it is YouTube-only!) LP “I Am a DJ,” a decidedly unofficial compilation of remixes/reconstructions I’d done of other artists’ music using vocal stems and/or, whenever available, other instrumental elements (including beats, samples, etc.) from the respective original versions. The compilation includes remixes of songs by Nine Inch Nails, IAMX, Jeff Buckley, and even, yes, Queen, amongst others. Although YouTube does not let one monetize videos that include samples of other artists’ work ― either in full or in part ― they also did not slap on any hard penalties for sharing them, either, so, for me, this was an ideal way to get my mixes “published” without also getting myself entangled with copyright infringement issues!

Track 5: Unsilent Ones

This track opens the LP “To Be Human,” which ended up being the first of a second triptych of LPs I would create during the first half of 2023 (a year that really turned out to be my “year of triptychs,” or “year of trilogies,” by the way, something I will mention again later). I was originally going to include the title track from that LP here, but after listening to this compilation-in-progress several times through in slightly different combinations, I decided instead to go with the current selection, a track which I also do quite like. 

(Of course, had I instead decided on the track “To Be Human” I would also have neatly avoided the issue of tracks 4 and 5 having such similar-sounding titles, and by so doing also the need to explain or even mention this in these “extended liner notes,” as I am about to again do below. However, as “Unsilent Ones” ended up being my final selection, here goes…!)

So then… To repeat and further explain, “Unsilent Ones” does not (and never did) have any connection whatsoever with “Silent Ones,” the latter having been named after a whispered “silent ones” refrain from the end of the remix I’d done of another artist’s work (see the entry for Track 4, above, for more details about the composition of “Silent Ones”). Instead, this track was the result of remixing/rearranging another bookend track I’d done for the “To Be Human” album released immediately after “1000 Lights,” a track I’d entitled “Unsilent.” To put it simply, and hopefully to also avoid any further confusion, the tracks “Unsilent Ones” and “Unsilent,” which respectively open/close the “To Be Human” LP, are very much related, while the tracks “Silent Ones” (Track 4 of this compilation) and “Unsilent Ones” (Track 5, as well as the track currently being discussed!) are only , coincidentally related by name.

The track “Unsilent” (which is not included on this compilation) is a somewhat longer piece that, as mentioned above, closes the LP, and which includes several spoken word samples from three individuals I rather respect, two of whom are no longer with us. The first is Kōbō Abe (RIP), the author of several novels and plays, including “The Box Man” and “Woman in the Dunes” (originally written in Japanese, these are their officially-translated titles), David Bowie (also RIP, and of course Bowie was not only a “rock star” and a sort of musical genius, but he was also an avid reader and deep thinker in his own right), and Noam Chomsky (professor emeritus of Linguistics/Semantics and a political expert/activist, as well as a self-labeled anarchist, meaning that he did not/does not trust any government ― even those that are said to be “democratically elected,” such as the U.S. government ― to create a just and fair society, and so is generally rather critical of such governments in his books, interviews, and lectures).

On the current track, “Unsilent Ones,” instead of sampling the voices of others, as I did on “Unsilent,” I instead decided to “sample myself”; that is, to take the spoken word bits I used on the track (which I then layered and effectorized) from one of my own YouTube talks, a talk in which I was ― in rather “meta” fashion, we might say (“meta” as in “metafiction,” not as in Mark Zuckerberg’s company Meta, in which case the word would be need to be spelled with a capital[istic] M anyway, right?) ― discussing Bowie’s own discussion, an excerpt of which is included on the final track of the LP, i.e. “Unsilent.” By the bye, sampling my own spoken voice/words from my semi-regular YouTube talks is something I would increasingly come to do in my music starting in around 2022. To this day, I am still doing it.

Track 6: White Pearl (’23 Version)

“White Pearl” is the instrumental variation of what was originally a piano and vocal song I’d written for my daughter in 2018 entitled “Always,” a track mentioned above as having given my LP of piano songs and new arrangements of older, originally guitar-based songs its title. 

The original version of “Always” had rather simple piano chords, as I was not yet very confident in my abilities on the keyboard, certainly not as confident or capable as I would become by the time of this recording. Further, my daughter was also then still rather young and appropriately childlike, so the original arrangement naturally had a more childlike and playful, as well as uptempo, feel to it. This was particularly true of the original mix I did which, aside from the piano and vocals, also included “Logic drums” and some sampled upright bass, which I’d myself input with the USB keyboard. (I removed the bass and drums from the mix for the “Always” LP, but the song remained a rather simple and “cute” song even in its simpler, more stripped-down version.)

One night in mid-July of 2023 ― the night before my daughter’s 11th birthday, to be precise ― I decided that, as she was now rapidly moving from “childhood” to “teenhood,” I also wanted to do a more mature (or, put another way, “less childlike”), slightly slower and more intricate version via the keyboard (piano). Let me preface this by saying that two years prior, in 2021, I had also done an (at-the-time) new strummed acoustic arrangement of “Always” on my Ibanez guitar, using a pick, and then again, the following year, I also rerecorded the new guitar arrangement, using this time my then still-recently-acquired Guild acoustic in a “pick-less” (fingers-only) version with neck tapping, etc. That recording appeared on the “Waves Between Emptiness” LP, which was published in July of 2022.

In any case, and to get back to the story behind the inception of the piano composition “White Pearl”… On the night before my daughter’s birthday in ’23 I sat down in front of my laptop computer with my mini-USB keyboard in my lap and my black and red Audio-Technica earphones in my ear canals in my darkened apartment room and started playing with the basic chord and melodic structure of “Always.” (I loved those earphones, by the bye, as they had really excellent sound with good bass, but unfortunately I lost them at the airport in Fukuoka when I visited September of last year!) Though I had planned initially to eventually add a new vocal line to what would become the finished piano track, instead, after completing the recording and then further arranging and mixing what I had laid down in Logic, I rather felt that it was quite good “as-is,” that is, instrumentally. And so, in the end, rather than attempting to “fix something that was not broken,” I instead just “let it be” (with a tip of the hat to the Fab Four for borrowing the expression here!). 

It was also now clear to me that this version would no longer be called “Always.” What had emerged from the process of attempting to rearrange the former song via the keyboard was instead a completely new track, one that had surely evolved from its earlier, simpler, more uptempo cousin, but which was also rather distinct from it. The title I gave the new version, “White Pearl,” itself has several metaphorical meanings within the context of its being a song for my July-born daughter, including the fact that her birth date aligns with the color white and also because her birthstone is pearl. 

One of the lines from the original song I wrote, “Always,” goes: “When you get older / I want to buy you a jewel”… Although what I am now about to suggest may seem to some skeptical readers like I am trying too hard to create a connection where none may have in fact existed, I am actually quite tempted to think that perhaps the “jewel” of the original lyric from “Always” may actually have been a kind of foreshadowing of the “pearl” that would eventually emerge in this later iteration, a sort of hint or sign from a past self to a future self, the self who created this newer, retitled song five years later. It’s a rather romantic, poetic fancy, of course, and really, even if its author had not consciously intended the connection when his younger self originally wrote those lyrics to his younger daughter, well… I mean, hey, why not, right? Anything is possible, after all.

Another unofficial footnote I’ll just tag on to this entry is that I rerecorded this song in two versions again just last month (by “last month” I mean to say August of 2025; it is, at the time of this writing, the end of September). The first rerecording I did (in Logic) appears on the “9” LP (published as Marc Lowe, and also not to be confused with the “9” LP released as This Dark Shroud in 2023, which I do, however, consider a sort of “cousin LP” to the former). Another rawer version, originally a home rehearsal I filmed/recorded via my iPhone, rather than via Midi, and from which I then later extracted the mixed/remastered audio, was included on my more-recent “Black Keys, White Keys” LP, with some recently-sampled “rain” added to the background both in order to create atmosphere and also, from an engineering perspective, to cover up any unwanted “hiss” from the raw iPhone recording. (The latter LP, “Black Keys…,” is currently available on BandCamp, as well as in audio-only format with a static image on my YouTube page. I plan eventually to have it published via streaming services such as Apple Music, though at present there is no set release date for it.)

Track 7: Vanity (Decadent Mix)

Let me start by saying here that, in addition to the three separate “triptychs” I eventually created under the artist name Marc Lowe in 2023, starting with “Triad” in late February and progressing to the “Human” and then “Solitude” trilogies, that same summer I also rather spontaneously decided to revive my until-then “retired” (or if not retired, per se, then at least “slumbering indefinitely”) side-project This Dark Shroud. Let me first say a few words about that project here, for those who may know little to nothing about it.

In late summer 2017 I’d started publishing a certain style of dark electronic music under the This Dark Shroud moniker ― or TDS, for short (which, for the record, has never and will never have anything to do with “Trump Derangement Syndrome” [also shortened to “TDS”! ouch…]). The reason for this was that I felt that a certain post-Industrial sound I had birthed almost by accident one day, back in the summer of ’17, after spontaneously coming up with a mostly-instrumental electronic track via Midi that featured dark dance beats, my own looped half-spoken vocals, and various other samples, should be published under a different artist name, one that would be shrouded (pun?) in a bit more mystery than simply “Marc Lowe.” The track of which I speak, by the bye, was entitled “Undo.”

Originally, all of the cover art I had created for my This Dark Shroud releases between 2017-‘18 was rather abstract, and the first few LP jackets were presented in stark black and white. Also, as a strictly self-determined, self-maintained rule, I never put my own countenance on any of the TDS CD jackets, front or back (at the time I was making and selling CDs, with full CD jacket art on both sides of my self-designed cases including the tracklisting on the back and other pertinent information about a given release); further, and with the exception of a single “one-off” show I’d done in the summer of 2018 after my bassist Joe Shotaro had informed me that he couldn’t join me on stage after previously booking a show (and having at the time assumed we’d be performing as a duo) for which I was, additionally, one of the co-organizers, I also never performed solo under the name This Dark Shroud. 

Not, that is, until 2019, when Joe (who still lives in Fukuoka, and with whom I am still in touch from time to time) and I decided to start performing and releasing music together under the TDS moniker. From that point on, This Dark Shroud had become no longer simply a solo side-project, nor was it any longer primarily a recording-only project, but rather it became a living, breathing live performance unit. That is…for a time. Later the same year ― after having recorded three full-length CDs together as TDS at my place via Logic and also having done several live shows together in and around Fukuoka (we performed regularly at the livehouse Utero, in addition to having done several other shows at other venues around town in ‘19) ― we’d unfortunately had to dissolve the project. This was due to my imminent move from Fukuoka to Tokyo, as my full-time contract at the university where I had been teaching no less than eight full years had come to an abrupt and rather painful/difficult end for me at the beginning of April (I ended up moving to Tokyo in October of the same year, and the project was officially discontinued after our final show, which, if memory serves, was in August of ‘19). From that point on I had considered the project more-or-less “over,” at least until (and unless) Joe and I could logistically revive the project as a duo again at some point in the future; that is, if fate deemed it feasible.

By the time summer of 2023 rolled around it had already been nearly four years since the dissolution of the duo-version of TDS and, although I really hadn’t any intention of reviving the moniker for solo work, one day that summer I sat down to create what I determined would be a “beat-heavy” electronica track. This was primarily because I hadn’t been doing many “beat-heavy” things at the time ― listening to the tracks preceding this one will give the listener some idea of what I am saying, I think, though the track “Undone” at least has a few beats on it ― and so, one day, I suddenly again got the urge to do something that would really be “Electronic(a),” with a capital “E,” maybe even in a heavier “Industrial” (capital “I”!) vein, which would essentially mean doing a song or songs with pounding, straightforward (to start with, anyway) electronic beats. The track would be a song that, in other words, someone could potentially dance to, only slower and more plodding/darker than typical techno, which tends to be faster and more geared toward club party people (a group for which my music has never been intended, which is likely also why I seldom if ever get invited to perform at parties or raves or DJ events, despite being, at least some of the time, an “electronic musician”)… And so, after laying down a pulsating backbone composed of several layers of heavily-manipulated beat loops, I improvising some vocals (the first words “Take the vanity from your eyes…” flowing from my mouth as I started thinking about people’s obsession with the way they appeared to others on SNS, etc.), and then adding a synth bass part, and then, finally… Boom! 

The finished track, I soon realized, or likely I’d realized it even before it was completed, could only be published asThis Dark Shroud! I distinctly remember thinking this very thought to myself at the time (and I may have even spoken it to aloud to myself, since I was, after all, sitting there arranging and recording the track alone in my apartment room!). And thus, from that point on, This Dark Shroud “V.2023” had been revived; it had also returned in some sense, once again, to its original “solo” form, though it was also to evolve to become a rather different creature as time went on… It was now also a post-pandemic TDS, a less naive, more socially and politically-engaged TDS. And the man behind the moniker would now be making a very different kind of TDS music from the initial compositions he had done c. 2017-18, despite the similiarities in some aspects between the former and the present versions…

Note that this version of “Vanity,” subtitled “Decadent Mix,” is the second of the two “bookend” mixes appearing on the Vanity LP, the first being the original mix I had created before the LP was an LP.

Track 8: Red Signals (’23)

The song “Red Signals” was originally written in 2017, and it appeared on what was essentially my first-ever bona fide full-length “solo electronica album” of that year, alongside songs such as “A Liar” (the ’23 rerecorded version of which appears on this compilation) and “The Dial Is in the Bathroom” (a song as important to my musical past as “Black Nail,” though not included on this compilation). Prior to the completion of the LP to which I am now referring ― republished last year (’24) as “The Angel of Death: Bricolage Versions (2017/2018)” ― I had experimented with beats and synth basslines in GarageBand sans keyboard, but those recordings I now consider to essentially have been early demos, or perhaps ur-versions, of material I would later refine (and also remaster the sound via Logic) after I’d acquired my first USB keyboard and a bit more technical savvy in terms both of arranging and mixing my own music.

The very first version I’d recorded of “Red Signals” had been composed and performed on the keyboard, not the guitar. As the LP had begun to take shape (I am now talking about the LP I’d been working on back in 2017, not the one from 2023), I had decided to create a second alternative arrangement of the song with acoustic guitar arpeggios and additional electronic backing/beats. That “alt.” version I’d done and later added to the LP was remixed and rearranged by me several times over the following two years, and it was this version, rather than the original keyboard-based arrangement, which became the one I would perform whenever I attempted the song live with backing tracks running, either solo and/or when it was performed with other projects, such as Laughing Moon (at the end of ’17) or with Joe Shotaro in the duo version of This Dark Shroud in ‘19. In fact, and as an aside, the skeleton (i.e. the tempo, basic beats, vocals, etc.) from the original ’17 recording had even served as the “base” upon which Joe and I had recreated our This Dark Shroud duo album versions in 2019, though of course those recordings ended up sounding quite different overall from the earlier solo arrangements.

In any case, as many years had gone by, and as my guitar playing style, too, had changed quite drastically by the summer of ‘23 (I had by ’22 stopped using a pick completely, having acquired my Guild acoustic, and I had already started doing a lot of guitar neck/body tapping, etc. as well by then). Further, as I had already been in the process of rerecording material from my own backcatalog of songs in ‘23 ― both electronic-style as This Dark Shroud and acoustic and electronic-style as Marc Lowe ― I decided one day that I now wanted to do a new solo version of “Red Signals” to add to the roster, one that would feature my updated sound/style of playing (and singing). And so this time I would create a new recording “from scratch,” rather than relying on previous recordings and then further rearranging or remixing them, as I had done with so many previous iterations I had created between 2017-19…

The first version of “Red Signals” I recorded in the sweltering summer of ’23 was presented as an acoustic/vocal-only mix (the guitar/vocals were recorded separately in Logic, for optimal separation during mixing), and then I later also made an alt. version on which I added in some electronic beats. The version included here is the first of two such “electronic” mixes I had created in the summer of ‘23, blending beats and/or other electronic elements with the acoustic guitar and vocals I had originally laid down, and it appeared on my solo LP “Red Signals” in 2023, which also included the first, more stripped-down acoustic/vocal-only mix. A second “electronic” mix in a somewhat different arrangement appeared on the album “The Signs Were There” (also in ’23) for This Dark Shroud, though I reentitled it “Red Signals, Blue Skullz” in order to distinguish it from this version.

Track 9: Palimpsest 001

What might this track, published on the Marc Lowe LP “Faded Out of Sight,” have to do with This Dark Shroud V.2023? Put simply, after rebooting the TDS project and having also completed a full “triptych” of LPs for that project as well (Vanity/9/The Signs Were There), I began playing around with different song parts ― a piano line here, a vocal line there ― in Logic, and soon I had created a unique series of “palimpsests.” Palimpsest is the term I have come to use for whenever I blend several tracks and/or several elements from several tracks before layering and (re)effectorizing them in various ways to create different sorts of abstract and (I think) interesting sound collages. 

Initially, I had considered releasing several of these collaged tracks together as “The Signs Were NOT There: This Dark Shroud Reconstructions” (note that the final part of the TDS triptych, which had recently been released at the time, is entitled “The Signs Were There,” so the title of this ultimately never-released non-release was a riff off of that)… The album would have ended up a sort of remix/experimental TDS “Maxi Single/Extended EP” kind of online BandCamp-exclusive “Hey man, I’m doing all of this for fun anyway, so WTF, right? Feel free to download and enjoy, if it makes you as happy as it has me” kind of release. Arguably, all of my releases are “self-indulgently-insignificant” in this sense, since I am not making them for any particular audience ― perceived or actual ― and since I also make no dosh from any of the work I do, past or present. But this is a topic for another time…

In any case, it had gotten to the point where I had created a cool jacket for the release,  and I had even maybe put it on my TDS BandCamp page a few days or a week before deciding to pull the plug on it and thereby to transfer two of the “palimpsests” I had created for it onto the “main LP” (as Marc Lowe) I was then working on, “Faded Out of Sight.” This LP was a combination of piano-only instrumentals, some shorter spoken word/experimental things, three different versions of my piano/vocal arrangement of Nine Inch Nail’s “With Teeth” era b-side “Non-Entity” (including one instrumental mix that no longer resembles the song at all, but came about as a byproduct of experimenting with several different arrangements), and then, of course, the two palimpsests, including the present one. 

If one is familiar with my music to some degree and listens closely, several elements from several previously-released things ― both material from This Dark Shroud and from Marc Lowe ― can be noted floating around the mix. That’s a promise.

10. Scratchkickplay

Toward the end of 2023, I started working on new material that heavily incorporated the Kaossilator Pro + synth pad alongside the Kastle 2.0 analog noise synth, making all sorts of ambient noise-style abstract sound collages with them. Several of these improvisations were later mixed together in Logic with beats, samples, spoken word, and so on, and in some cases I also added in organic elements, such as a shaker, the clanking of an old burnt kettle I had had lying around at the time, and even a bit of improvised acoustic (slide, plucked, tapped…) guitar. I also recorded quite a bit of other new material from this time onward, with some of these solo home sessions and experiments stretching into January of the new year.

In the end, after around two months of playing around and recording material of all kinds and in various styles, I had so much new material to choose from that the LP ended up a sprawling two-plus hours. In fact, it would have been even longer had I not shaved off several things from it to keep it to a more reasonable length, and also to avoid repetition. I entitled the LP “Angels of Chaos,” and both this track and the one that follows it on this compilation are taken from this release. As I had many tracks to choose from it was difficult to whittle the selections down to just two things, but here they are…

As an aside, I actually ended up putting many of the aforementioned outtakes / alt. versions on another single-length LP I had decided rather last minute to release prior to the new 2x-LP, an LP called “Shadowlife.” The title was directly inspired by the cover art I had decided to use, a recent (at the time) self-shot photo from the first or second of the new year (i.e. January first or second; I now do not remember which…) I had taken of my shadow (literally, and wearing a hat) reflected on the pavement directly in front of me whilst standing/waiting in line behind a couple who were also outside in the cold waiting in line. (In Japan, it is traditional to visit a local Shinto shrine during the first week of the new year to pay one’s respects and to “pray” for a good coming year. Most of the people waiting in line for this were standing together with a partner or with their families, but I was, as always, alone, so the photo I took of my shadow peering out from behind the couple’s double-shadow seemed appropriately emblematic of my life here in Tokyo ― a “shadowlife,” indeed.)

To say something about the current track, then… Ah yes. “Scratchkickplay” is an instrumental that I suppose I might have to describe as “Electronica” or “IDM techno” (?) or something like that, though I really don’t think it neatly fits into either of these categories nor are there any others I can think of that would properly describe it. (“Progressive Post-Rock Industrial Drum ’n’ Bass, maybe? Mm…maybe not.) After several minutes of heavily syncopated pulsing electronic beats and some fairly chaotic synth lines zig-zagging about the mix ― themselves having been input via Midi keyboard by yours-truly, so that the chaos was performed in “real time” during their recording without any pre-planning ― the track goes quiet for a few moments before a sole reverb-laden improvised piano emerges before the aural journey dissolves into silence…

Track 11: Symphony of Glass

And now we have come to “Symphony of Glass,” the second of two tracks from the “Angels of Chaos” double-LP. This is another rather abstract track, albeit one very different from “Scratchkickplay,” that features some samples of the voice of one of my musical heroes, Ryuichi Sakamoto (d. 2023), who is here speaking in both English and Japanese. The track itself is also a sort of “palimpsest” of sorts, as it includes, in addition to my heavily-effectorized spoken voice, layers from various other things, both old and new, including (to cite just a couple of examples), “Open Up the Scar,” a track that Joe and I had often performed as This Dark Shroud in 2019 (though this recording is taken from a different solo version), as well as an early solo recording of “Deceptive Glass,” a song I had written a cappella during my tenure with the rock band Chattering Man and had performed with my first band, Glass Gecko. (Having now mentioned this, one can more easily understand why the reference to “glass” was included in the title, I think.) An alt. version of the current track was published on yet another (completely separate) release consisting primarily of live and live-at-home performances, and that LP (just to confuse the reader some more!) was itself entitled “Symphony of Glass” (!).

Confused, maybe? No problem. Let’s just keep going…

Track 12: A Liar ’24

“A Liar,” as well as the track that follows it on the present compilation, “Phantom,” were two of three rerecorded songs I ultimately ended up executing (or would it then be “re-executing”?) for the “Angels of Time” LP. What the heck, though, the observant reader/listener might by now be wondering, do the LP titles “Angels of Chaos” and “Angels of Time” have to do with each other? Well, actually, not much. Why, then, the observant reader/listener may thereupon be tempted to inquire, did I decide on using the term “angels” on both? In the case of the former, I actually don’t remember very well (honestly, I don’t, at least not right now…), but with “Angels of Time” it was quite an intentional move on my part. Let me further explain.

The title “Angels of Time” itself goes back to an LP I had mentioned in passing above, in the entry discussing the track “Red Signals.” The LP on which the first versions of the song “Red Signals” originally appeared had been called “Angel of Death.”(*) In 2024 I rediscovered the original recordings of that early electronica LP (“AoD”) in two iterations (2017/2018 versions), and so I started considering that I might rerecord several of the tracks from the original LP(s) in order to, in essence, create an updated/reinterpreted “past-meets-present”-style “Angels of Death V.2024” type album. 

OK, quick breath before continuing. Ready?

3-2-1…

To continue, then… Songs such as “The Dial Is in the Bathroom,” as well, of course, as “Red Signals” had originally been on the “Angel of Death” LPs of 2017/18, but as I had already recorded new versions of both the previous year (and note that, although I did not include it on the current compilation, I in fact also remixed and recorded new vocals for a new 2023 version of “The Dial Is in the Bathroom” for my TDS project of that year; it appears on the second of three LPs published in 2023, the “9” LP); therefore, I didn’t want to yet again rerecord and/or remix either of them, as that would have been rather redundant. Nonetheless, there were several other tracks, including “A Liar,” that I’d only recorded once all the way back in ’17 and had not performed or even really thought about at all in several years. And thus, the current version of this track…

Interestingly, when thinking about it now, the way I had started reworking this one was essentially the complete reverse of how I’d approached my 2023 rerecording of “Red Signals.” In the former case, I had not wanted to go back to the original recording for reasons discussed earlier (i.e. in short, because I’d already remixed the original recording several times previously and wanted to start with a “clean slate” by making a brand new recording), but with “A Liar,” a song I’d neither attempted to remix nor rerecord since five/six years prior, respectively, I thought to use the originally-recorded vocals I’d done back in ’17 and to “duet” with the me of the past for this newer iteration. (This was not actually the first time I’d done so… The precedent for this style of “duetting” with a past self was established with my rerecorded vocal for “The Ties That Bind Us (Duet with Ghosts),” released at the end of 2022, though the original, acoustic/vocal track had been recorded in 2019.) 

My first experiment with “trying to do something new” with the original 2017 recording of “A Liar” I had rediscovered, having been saved on an external drive in Logic, was that I simply remixed it, using the original synth parts I’d laid down along with the original vocal recording, and then adding or subtracting elements to/from it, etc. I also thereafter created an instrumental mix with different kinds of samples in the background (such as Suling flute, effectorized spoken word, wind sounds, etc.) and so on before completing the mix here, which also has, in addition to my “new” vocal recording, an electric guitar improv. over the top of it. Another mix of this track can also be heard on the first (and only) This Dark Shroud LP of 2024, “The Unbecoming,” which I worked on almost immediately after the completion of “Angels of Time.”

(*) Technically-speaking, that LP had itself originally been entitled “Red Signals” before I’d revised and retitled it to “Angel of Death”… If this is too confusing or seems completely irrelevant to anything, feel free to ignore this little factoid/footnote, since it doesn’t directly apply to the discussion of the two “Angels” LPs, above, but was rather simply a sidebar I would otherwise have felt guilty about had I neglected to mention it.

Track 13: Phantom ’24

“Phantom” is a track with a long, complicated history, and it’s one I have been doing a lot these past couple of years in a newer acoustic arrangement. The very first version of “Phantom,” however, apart, that is, from the very-very first demo version, which was literally just a cappella (!), was a super heavy arrangement that the guitarist of the band I’d been singing for from 2014 to the beginning of 2016, Chattering Man, as I’d briefly mentioned in an earlier entry, created around the raw vocal part I’d sent him in demo form. After leaving that band in 2016, followed by the break up of my first (and also last, i.e. “bona fide” four-member) band, Glass Gecko, at the end of the same year, I performed it from time to time in collaboration with others, as well as solo on the electric guitar (*) with a drum machine (this was in my very early “solo live” days, by the bye ― you can see just how much of a past this track has now, right?!).

In 2023, for my 230226 “I will be 50 years old soon” mostly-acoustic LP, I did a new acoustic arrangement of “Phantom,” one that has influenced the way I still play it live or in studio today (though every time I perform it, it changes a bit, as my style has become more and more improvisatory over time). After a sort of brief intro track that opens the original “Angel of Death” LP of 2017, my very first solo recording attempt of “Phantom” crashes in at Track 2. (Note that on the 2018 iteration of the LP, I would replace “Phantom” with my first arrangement of “Red Signals” with acoustic arpeggios and heavy beats.) At the time of recording “Phantom” via Logic in early ’17, which was only around a year after Chattering Man had dissolved, and with that heavy rock sound for this song still in mind, I hadn’t yet envisioned it ideally as a quieter acoustic piece, but rather as something heavy and with synth bass and beats. When I decided to rerecord some things from the “Angel of Death” LP(s) in ’24, then, it wouldn’t do to rerecord another acoustic version of “Phantom,” as I had the previous year, but I did “get the bug” to try it, again, for the first time in years, in a heavier arrangement, with electric guitar and pounding drums. This time, I decided, I would go into the studio and play the drums, LIVE (recorded live, of course, but real acoustic drums instead of Midi drum pads, as I’d used at home on the ’17 version). And so I did.

In order to conclude the story of the recording of the “Angels of Time” LP as simply as I can, let me first mention that the third rerecorded track I attempted from the original “Angel of Death” LP was “Only When I Tried to Find You,” which is a rather long track featuring, in its rerecorded version, improvised Suling, which was stretched to impossible lengths via an effector, so that it sounds much lower than would have been possible to play live, along with a long, improvised confessional about events that had occurred in “the past” (a past that, as with any/all pasts, no longer actually exists; a past as elusive and translucent as say, even, an angel…). 

Instead of rerecording several additional tracks from the original album to flesh out the new LP (and there were many I had given serious consideration to before ultimately abandoning), I instead ended up remixing several other things from that same early period of recording “electronic music” via Logic solo with my first Midi keyboard (i.e. ’17 into early-mid ‘18), and/or taking older tracks and adding several new elements to them before rearranging them almost beyond recognition, so as to create essentially “brand new tracks.” I also recorded another very lengthy track ― slightly longer than “Only When I Tried to Find You,” in fact ― “from scratch” (though it also included some reeffectorized samples of the electric guitar improv I had very recently done for “A Liar ’24”) that closes the eponymously entitled album “Angels of Time.” The track features a sample of the voice of J. Krishnamurti speaking about time, some backing vocal samples from the original recording of “A Liar,” as well as a long, improvised spoken word incantation riffing on themes of time, loss, death, and etc., not to mention that between the spoken word I also spontaneously sang fragments of several other songs from the original “Angel of Death” LP, such as “Waiting,” “Nothing,” and “The Dial Is in the Bathroom,” hence wrapping up and concluding the album, the project, and (hopefully, also) any further need to revisit the dark angels of my past in one fell swoop… (or did it, in fact, have such an effect?).

(*) I used the same Telecaster then as I am using now, though it had gecko and lizard stickers all over it at the time, as well as a white “plate” on the front rather than the black covering of today that makes it look like I had perhaps bought Jeff Buckley’s old Telecaster at an auction…this was actually not intentional, by the bye, as much of a fan of JB as I still am today!

Track 14: Nietzsche’s Curse

Once again, now, let us return to This Dark Shroud, though this time we shall find the TDS project (somewhat uncomfortably) morphing into its 2024 iteration, or what might have been (but wasn’t) labeled “TDS V.2024.”

The current track is, in many ways, really the antithesis of everything the V.2023 revived version of TDS stood for: heavy electronica with beats and noise. The current track is, that is to say, rather…quiet, with no beats or synth bass. And the main instrument featured, aside from the voice, is the Suling flute, an Indonesian bamboo flute I acquired at the beginning of 2024 in order to perform my new 2024 arrangement of the David Bowie and Brian Eno 1977 composition “Warszawa” live. I wanted to do the song this time around with “real live flute,” rather than playing the flute melody line, as I had when I’d performed it live in an earlier arrangement back in early 2020, on synth (my Yamaha MX49 keyboard/synthesizer, which I’d regularly been using for live shows at the time, had a sampled flute sound that had worked well).

I had once, several years ago, studied the Japanese Shakuhachi flute, but that instrument, I knew, was very difficult to play indeed, and I did not have the confidence to perform the “Warszawa” melody on the Shakuhachi (I still had a very cheap one at home at the time and even tried playing it, but it definitely wasn’t going to happen without first practicing it for a long, long, long time!), so one day I trecked over to a used instrument store here in Tokyo I knew of to see whether I couldn’t find myself some sort of “ethnic wooden flute” that would be somewhat easier to play live than the Shakuhachi. And, well, talk about timing! Or was it, rather, fate?? There, in the display case that day, I eyeballed a bamboo flute the likes of which I’d never before seen, and it was reasonably priced, too (less than U.S. $50.00, as I recall). I asked about it, but the people at the store themselves didn’t even know what it was called or where/what country it was from (they had to look it up when I asked), just that it was a bamboo flute that had been sitting there for several months, or perhaps it was even years, and that no one, apparently, had wanted to buy in all that time (perhaps because the customers looking for wind instruments, too, like the people working at the music store, and like me at the time, for that matter, simply had no idea what it was nor perhaps could they imagine what it sounded like!).

And so, I asked if I could play this flute, which I later learned was called, in Japanese, a “su-rin,” or, in English spelling, a “Suling,” hailing, apparently, from Bali, and I found that, firstly, it was very easy to play, especially as compared to the Shakuhachi (just getting any sound out of the Shakuhachi can take weeks or even months to achieve, literally, because there is no mouthpiece and the technique needed to produce a steady tone ― not to mention an expressive or strong or pleasant one ― is not so easy), and second that, being a bamboo flute (like the Shakuhachi), it had exactly the kind of sound I was envisioning for my live version of “Warszawa.” 

After asking for and getting a slightly lower price on the instrument (considering the fact that they hadn’t been able to sell it for so long, and also considering that it was not in “pristine condition” and didn’t include a case or extended warranty…) I bought it, brought it home, and tried to play my version of “Warszawa” on it several times against the prerecorded backing. I found that, with the six holes (all in front) of this particular size and style of Suling, and with its particular range, it didn’t quite work the way I had hoped for this piece, but I also found that simply improvising on the flute was a lot of fun and not at all difficult for me to do, in fact much less difficult than I had imagined. (This may in part be because I had also played the clarinet for six long years in grade and middle school ― daily practicing/playing Mozart’s, among other composers’, music, as well as scales and all of that ― before taking up the drums, so now, to play on a lateral flute similar to the clarinet in some ways, felt pretty natural to me). 

This instrument, of course, can be heard on recordings prior to the TDS LP, going as far back at least as “Angels of Chaos,” published at the beginning of the year, not to mention that I had also used it on the “Angels of Time” LP quite a bit. But this was the first instance of me deciding to use it on a This Dark Shroud track/album… Rather than using the instrument as a mere “accent,” I instead built the entire track around the Suling (note that the only other “sound” on the recording, apart from the vocals, is a quiet synth drone). Why, then, did I decide to put this track on a This Dark Shroud LP instead of a Marc Lowe album? Well, for the very reason I logically shouldn’t have done so: It sounds like a Marc Lowe track, both in terms of its style and in terms of the somewhat personal lyrics, and thus by placing it here it further blurred the lines between “Marc Lowe” (the artist) and “This Dark Shroud” (the artist’s alter-ego project/moniker). This is a trend that would creep into the two TDS albums that would follow “The Unbecoming” earlier this year as well, which by the bye were both cross-published as BOTH This Dark Shroud/Marc Lowe, and so both appear in either of my streaming catalogs simultaneously.

15. Before and After Covid (No More to Say)

“Before and After Covid” is from the album of the same title, and it appears in two “bookend” versions, this one (the final track on the LP) and the opening track (which elides the parenthetical subtitle). The difference between the two versions is somewhat subtle, but also crucial: The opening track has a spoken word part atop the backing, on which the voice of the narrator (me) talks about how things in the world were/became “before and after Covid,” whereas in this, final version from the album, that spoken word part is gone, leaving only the skeleton of an already skeletal frame: the sound of rain (sampled from my balcony one rainy afternoon…or was it evening?) along with a loop of the sliding door of my balcony slamming closed, accompanied by static noise. Originally, I had planned on ending the first half of this retrospective with the first version, the one that includes the spoken word part, but on second thought I decided, instead, to leave off Volume One with this perhaps slightly more mysterious “wordless” version. 

Why?

Well, why not?

Part II coming soon…

ML

Tokyo, Japan

Final edits:

September 30, 2025

19:00 (7:00 p.m.)