24. [Continued]... (On my return to Fukuoka in March, 2023)

I decided that I would return for a few days to my home "stomping grounds" of Fukuoka this year. It would be the first time I visited since the pandemic struck three years prior, in early 2020. The last time I had visited (in large part to visit my daughter, who at the time was still living in Fukuoka with her mother, though they have since moved...) I had performed on my 47th birthday, in late February of 2020, with some guests: both the guitarist and the bassist from my former Laughing Moon project had joined me onstage for a couple of songs, as had Sunny on guitar, who improvised on one "composed" song (with prepared backing tracks) as well as on one longer improv, where I not only played the synth and sang, but also got behind the drums to pound out some polyrhythms at one point. This performance occurred less than one month before the first State of Emergency was announced in Tokyo, and so, in the intervening years, I had not again had a chance to see people or to perform in Fukuoka. 

Live in Fukuoka, February 26, 2020 (my 47th birthday) with guests

And so, I booked a flight this past March and returned for a few days, hanging out at some of my old neighborhood digs, chatting with old friends and acquaintances, eating some delicious "Hakata-style" foods (the region is known throughout Japan for being both tasty and reasonable, and indeed it is!), and also making time to do both a photo and video shoot with my old friend M-san. (It was raining on both days, so we were mostly "stuck indoors" or else outside in the rain -- that being said, we also ended up going to some places we otherwise would never have gone to, and I later used some of the video and audio samples captured during my visit to make stuff with after I returned to Tokyo.)

I also performed live again, at Utero, the same livehouse at which I had performed my "final show" at the end of 2019, and also the birthday show "with guests" I mentioned in the above paragraph. I was completely alone on the stage this time, 100% solo, so to speak. The two former members of my Laughing Moon project, J and T, with whom I had performed on the same stage together in 2020, were in attendance as audience members (not to mention as friends!), though Sunny (whose birthday fell on the very day I performed) had had prior arrangements, and unfortunately could not be there this time.

My main instrument, which I brought with me from Tokyo, was the Guild acoustic, rather than the Yamaha MX49, as it had been three years prior. I accompanied myself with some audio/video backing that I had prepared, projecting images onto the large screen at the back of the stage during much of the 40-plus minute-long performance. One major difference as compared to the 2020 show, at which I had also used my own video projections and backing tracks, was that this year's performance was overall much more improvisational. I started off the show with a 15 minute-long improv sans video, one that was much in the same style as "A Memento Mori" from the "022623" LP and/or the improv I had included on "Abstrackt Distracktions" -- fragments of songs, spontaneous speech/spoken word, and other sections that, quite literally, seemed to come out of nowhere (such as when I began playing a section of Led Zeppelin's "Dazed and Confused," which my ex-bassist immediately recognized and shouted out a comment, as I expected him to!). 

This year's solo performance in March

As for the rest of the show, apart from two "beat-laden" songs from my backcatalog on which I played the keys (I used Utero's Roland keyboard for this, which they kindly lent me for the occasion), the backing audio tracks (synched with video) were mostly different kinds of ambient washes, sans beats, over which I allowed myself to play the acoustic in a much "looser" style than I had in previous years, maintaining some degree of balance between pure "improvisation" and performing full "songs." I also decided to include one cover song in the set, "Hallelujah," for which I used a sample of a rainstorm in the background, synching it to the video M-san and I had literally filmed the day before and sharing it less than 48 hours later with everyone who came (again, in the rain!) to see the show.

The trip overall was, for me, a lot of fun; some very good vibes, and the live event, too, in its totality ended up being a great success for me, certainly on a personal level. This was not only because many of my friends came out to see the show, despite the rain that had continued to fall that night, but also because the performance itself went rather smoothly, the feedback I got afterward from people who attended, both friends and others I had met that night for the first time (there were a few), and also from the livehouse people, was extremely positive, and, further, M-san had filmed the entire thing for me, so I had a very nice video to edit once I got back to Tokyo. (M used to film nearly all of my performances when I was living, and regularly performing, in Fukuoka, often at Utero -- this was all before the pandemic, of course. He had filmed not only my solo performances, but also many performances I had done with my collaborative units, such as TDS with J on bass in 2019, and the shows I'd performed with Sunny.)

The Fukuoka show on March 22 this year was actually so much a success to my mind that my motivation, upon returning to Tokyo, to once again start regularly performing solo, where it is so much more difficult for me, even after several years, to draw a crowd to shows (by "a crowd" I mean at least two or three people!), and where, in many cases, I am also asked to pay something merely for the "privilege" of performing began to diminish.*

* Let me just explain the "livehouse" system in Japan a bit more here, for those who might be completely unfamiliar. 

Performers are charged at many of the venues in Japan, especially the larger venues, but sometimes even small ones, if they cannot draw enough guests by themselves. All artists are essentially expected to do self promotion, something, as I've discussed at some length, above, I am not very good at. Having to pay a fee after lugging all of my stuff to the livehouse and doing the performance itself, regardless of the response of whoever might be in attendance to see their friend who plays before or after me or whatever, begs the question of what the point of performing live really is for me, when I could instead just spend the same time and energy working on new material in isolation, or writing a book, or doing a talk for my YouTube page, etc., without having to pay the livehouse or feeling somewhat depressed, or at least let down, by the fact that no one decided to come out in support. Ideally, yes, doing shows from time to time and having people come out to see me perform because he/she/they actually want to is ideal. But when the pattern becomes one of me showing up, performing, and then paying for drinks -- plus an additional, sometimes not-insignificant fee -- it gets to be a real drag, and after a time I have become less inclined to do regular shows under such conditions.)

And so, since returning to Tokyo last March, I have really only performed a handful of times, usually acoustically and with little fanfare indeed. Instead, I've been spending my time recording new material, including a new trilogy of LPs and two new This Dark Shroud LPs, all of which I will discuss in more detail below. 

This book, too, is something I've wanted to do for a long time.

I am very thankful that I am now making a bit of time to finally work on it. 

It is my singular pleasure to do this, as there is no deadline and no pressure to sell it, either.

As Frank Sinatra once sang, “I did it my way.”

I always have, and I always will.

June update: I recently returned to doing live performances as This Dark Shroud. Performing again this year as TDS is both, in a sense, reaching backwards and forwards at the same time; I had only once to-date performed solo under the TDS moniker, at Utero in 2018 (and then J and I continued the project as a collaborative duo in 2019, before I left Fukuoka for Tokyo), so this time around was the first time ever performing as TDS in Tokyo. I now, of course, also have new material from the two new LPs to perform, as well as some brand new arrangements of older TDS material I remixed for this year's project (some of which I had never performed live on a stage before, either), not to mention that both I and the world has much changed since 2018, a more innocent time before Covid, a time before the war in Ukraine, a time before the Doomsday clock had reached 90 seconds... I plan to continue “updating” the live TDS show over the coming months.

 23. "Triad 2023"

The album completed, I almost immediately started sharing news about it on my SNS feeds, setting the date for the LP's release to, can you guess? February 26, 2023, the date of my upcoming 50th birthday. I put it up for pre-order on BandCamp, submitted it for approval to my new (since last year) distributor, and shared the full-length version of the long improv, without splitting it into two halves, which I had, as briefly mentioned earlier, entitled "A Memento Mori," via my YouTube page, with a photo of my feet (i.e. dark shoes) in front of a wooden board, taken at a local park and, like the cover of the LP, converted to a stark black and white.

From this point, the new album ready to go, with around a month's wait until the official release date (not that anyone was anxiously awaiting it, other than me, but in my own mind there was still a fair amount of time left in front of me before it became available to the public), I started recalling some of the older recordings I'd done with "Sunny" c. 2019/2020, both before and during the first year of the pandemic. I had released two LPs of our material previously, in 2020, and started listening again to both of them via Apple Music, which then led to me revisiting some of the other recordings we'd done that either had never been released or were, at the time, not currently in any sort of circulation via streaming services. I had previously created, via a playlist on my computer, a compilation of songs we'd recorded which I quite liked; I'd even made cover art for it and popped it onto my BandCamp page temporarily. It was 2x-LP length, and I'd considered at one time taking down the shorter LPs I'd initially released via streaming services with my first distributor and replacing them with this newer compilation, now with my new distributor, though in the end I never did. 

Anyway, to make a long story shorter, in addition this year to eventually having compiled three new thematically-consistent compilations of our songs from the past (and eventually releasing them with my new distributor), I ended up also having the urge to play around some more with one of my solo songs that I'd recorded in the summer of 2020 during my "Covidian-blues" period; that is, when locking myself down in my new apartment (such a good boy, right? Actually, I was terrified of the virus, afraid it would infect my lungs, being born an asthmatic...). The piece was called "Self Control," which was my translation for the Japanese word jishuku (自粛), "self-discipline," or "self-restraint," and which was used frequently during the pandemic to reference "staying at home" and keeping social distance from others whenever it was necessary to be in public. 

I'd done a version of "Self Control" featuring Sunny's electric guitar, which I had rather heavily effectorized, using lots of distortion in order to turn it into a sort of noisy drone, and I wanted to use this version to create an updated version now. I searched for the original file to this song, which I'd recorded nearly three years prior on a different computer, in LOGIC, but did not have it, so, as I was about to give up on the idea of doing any remix or new version, I recalled that I still had the piano and vocal-less "backing track" (thanks to iCloud!) I'd used in late 2020 to perform the song live (which in fact I had done, though only once). Locating this, I put it into my LOGIC interface and recorded a brand new vocal atop it, with lyrics now sung in "past tense," updated for the present, and leaving off the piano part entirely, drawing Sunny's effectorized guitar right up in front of the mix.

This is all rather important to how the second part of my pre-50 birthday "triad" of LPs came about (I didn't want to call it a "triptych" or a "trilogy," in order to avoid making it sound too "Berlin Bowie-ish") because, when I was working on the "updated" version of the song, I thought that, if I made a loop of Sunny's "dirty distorted" guitar, it would create a cool backing/ambient wash from which I might construct a new atmospheric track... And, indeed, it did! I started playing around with this, and this then led, in turn, to wanting to do more with Sunny's older guitar recordings. One thing led to another led to another, and so on... 

I had had the vocal line to my last improvised collaboration with Sunny from late 2020 (appearing on "Hope," released in early '21), "Is Happiness a Verb?," in my head a lot at the time for some reason, and suddenly wanted to do something new with the original recording we'd made: a remix, perhaps, or a newly-arranged version...? As I was searching for the original file in LOGIC, although I never found it, I instead discovered a couple of other folders full of files of just the guitar improvs and solos that Sunny had sent me to be used for our various and intense collaborations between '19 and '20... And so, gleefully layering them, then playing around with them in LOGIC with the attitude of a child who makes multiple castles in his sandbox before first demolishing them before rebuilding them once again, I ended up with two new extended experimental pieces, to which I also added a new improvised spoken word part. These became "What Is the Body?" parts 1 and 2, and would be included on the new LP, eventually (the second part of this "triad" I am now discussing). I also eventually would record a third part. But, well, now I'm (once again!) getting just a little bit ahead of myself...

Around the same time, I also started becoming interested again in my own past solo recordings from that same "Covidian" year of 2020, which were really the "dark ages" for me... I revisited my seminal,* darkly-depressive work "Untitled" one day, and soon began playing around with the original files, running them in reverse, speeding them up, slowing them down, layering them, too, in different ways. 

* Note that, to me, the "Untitled" LP truly is "seminal"! I still consider it one of my most interesting, albeit scariest-sounding, solo albums from around this period in my musical development. It was a transitional LP to be sure, but my music would never again sound quite as it had before I'd made this LP once I'd crossed this particular threshold, both in terms of sound, concept, and also compositional technique (or, rather, perhaps it was more my "way of thinking about" composition than it was any sort of specific "technique," since much of the LP was in fact improvised "on-the-spot," as it were, particularly the vocal parts). There were a couple of other things I recorded in late '20 that would chronologically fall between this LP and the somewhat more hopeful Tetralogy that would be the focus of my musical activities in '21, beginning with the "Hope" LP. Nonetheless, in my mind, the albums "Untitled" and "Hope" are inextricably linked, almost as though the latter had followed directly after the former, even though, in fact, many of the songs on "Hope" were actually developments of tracks that had been recorded after the Untitled album in late '20, also after I had moved into my new apartment and was living alone during semi-lockdown, so this is obviously not the case. I think that maybe I have this feeling that they are so strongly interconnected because "There Is a Light," the final track of "Untitled," and the opening track of the "Hope" LP both deal lyrically with finding "light," alternately "hope," despite my having possessed at the time only a rather limited ability to view the world in this way; I still had viewed it through a very dark glass, indeed. (And yes, I am meaning here to indirectly reference Bergman's film, if not also the Biblical expression from which Bergman took his cue, for it does very much apply to my state of mind at the time I made both of these recordings.)

One more thing I'd like to add (this is a footnote, after all, albeit an important one, as are all footnotes, generally!) is that I also feel that the Untitled album somehow possesses the strange ability to both bridge and -- at least partially -- to explain (i.e. in both musical and conceptual terms) the gap/transition that occurred between much of the darker electronic work I'd done between 2017-2019 and Tetralogy in 2021. Something radical had shifted with the creation of "Untitled," an album I made when I was, literally, "in transition," moving away from my former partner of the last few years, my former place of residence as well (and this included many of my possessions, which I ended up relinquishing, all but a few pieces of my furniture, which I had been using for several years prior to my move to Tokyo and whilst living in Fukuoka, such as my bed, refrigerator, etc.), moving away from the security of having steady teaching work (Covid had slashed more than half of my classes at the time, hence more than half of my income as well), unsure as to what I should do next, scared of the virus, scared of everything, perhaps most especially scared of myself, and very much lingering somewhere between "hell and purgatory" at the time of the creation of this dark work, which was itself created in less than a week total... In any case, this mysterious "something" that the album possesses is something that even I cannot precisely put my finger on, not even now, despite there being a fair amount of distance between "it" and "me" (i.e. the "me" of the here and the now, the "me" that is today writing these sentences), though certainly it may be, at least in part, because it marked (in my mind) the start of the "Covid era," what I would come to refer to as "Covidian times," and so also the start of my own "falling down," i.e. the break-up and the move and the horrible depression, self-blame, etc., that followed the split, and so, by extension, it must then also have marked the beginning of my recovery from “falling down,” which is, of course, itself a good thing, or ultimately it turned out to be so (since I survived it and became more able to endure adversity and to stop beating myself up over things so much, as well as to become much more independent in my way of thinking). Perhaps, if I try and take a much broader view of this work in context of “the world outside,” I might also add that the LP marks the end of what had been our (collective) "age of innocence," i.e. our = the world's, in the sense that Covid was, for many, the beginning of the end of trusting our governments, our media sources, our pharmaceutical companies, and so on and so forth.

To accompany the first track I'd made during this experiment, a sort of sound collage incorporating two different tracks from the Untitled LP (the opener and closer, respectively), I created what might be called a sort of "video mashup" from the same two music videos I'd self-shot and edited originally for those same two tracks from the Untitled album. In this year's version, I put the images side-by-side in split-screen mode, run in reverse, the speed adjusted to fit the new mashup track, which I entitled "Thereisalightinadarkdarkroom" (the original tracks I had used to create this new, dark sound-tapestry, were "Room" and "There Is a Light"). I also did a rearranged/reinterpreted, slightly slowed-down mix of "2masks," now clocking in at over 20 minutes (the original version was also rather long, at 15 minutes, but they are definitely rather distinct from each other), retitling it "Death Does Not Become You." The loop of Sunny's guitar I'd used from "Self Control" eventually became a sprawling dark-ambient/noise piece called "Dark Currents" that ran for around 30 minutes. I kept experimenting, eventually melding together elements of "Phantom," from the recently-recorded version on "022623," with other things, ending up with yet another 30 minute-long dark ambient soundscape, and so on. At first I had what I thought was an LP and an EP, then it became two LPs, and then, having the idea to combine all of them, I ended up with a 2x-length very experimental LP I entitled, "Without Beginning or End."* Although it is only 9 tracks in total, the LP runs for over 2.5 hours.

* And the title of this essay, obviously, makes reference to this, yet the two are not, either, equivalent to each other, obviously, nor should they be thought to refer to each other per se, and also no work, be it an album or an essay, can actually ever be complete in any definitive sense anyway…)

Thus, "022623," though not yet released, was now also not only not my latest LP, but the newer double-length LP, being highly experimental and mostly electronic, stood and stands in almost complete contrast to the mostly-acoustic "022623," though both gave nods to my musical (and, by extension, personal) past, while also looking ahead to whatever the future might bring.

To preface what I intend to be a relatively brief explanation (two paragraphs!) of the inception and creation of the third part of this triangular triad, let me just say that I hadn't initially planned on doing a "triad" of albums at all. (Then again, this is not an untypical pattern for me, as I hadn't planned on doing a tetralogy in '21, nor on the"Six Symphonies" -- plus one -- I finished last year either, but...) Honestly, I hadn't even planned on the "Without Beginning or End" LP in the first place, a 2.5 hour-long "double LP" which I amazingly ended up finishing prior to my 50th birthday anniversary (it started, as I said, as two or three separate projects utilizing both previously used and also unused material from the vaults...a complete experiment!). So, the LP just sort of "happened," as so often is the case when I get into experimenting with sounds and playing around with stuff, old and/or new, in LOGIC. (Let me add that my saying this is not "ego" or prideful boasting, as some people sometimes have wrongly, and also quite rashly, assumed in the past. I consider music as "play," which is maybe why I am able to make so much new stuff so quickly, and also perhaps since it is not my "day job" and I am not working for anyone but me -- in other words, there is no financial or commercial or contractual reason or reasons I have for doing it, hence no pressure or rules to which I must conform, either. This is the best formula for making "good art" I think, regardless of popularity and/or other monetary considerations.)

About "Abstrackt Distracktions" (paragraph 1)

Sooo0 then...as an extension of my recent experiments with taking older tracks and running them at different speeds, layering multiple tracks atop one another, with or without additional effectors, etc., to create new things, I attempted the same with my "classic" electronic track "Black Nail." Actually, I played with three different versions of the modest-length track, running 2021's remixed version at high speed in reverse (Blknailskin), then taking a piano-only version from 2018's "Always" LP and combining it with part of another track I'd done for the 2021 Tetralogy, in which I had spontaneously sung part of the song between a spoken word section, then grafting the introduction to my piano/vocal version of Nine Inch Nail's "Hurt" onto the end of it (Blknailhurt). I also decided to remaster (for sound) a mashup I'd done late in the previous year of a remixed version my "producer" from the label I was briefly on had done for me/his label's EP, with elements of two of his other remixes of my songs layered in palimpsestic fashion (Blknailkaos). Then, there was also "Blknailnoize," which is an excerpt of a noisy remix I'd created in 2019, combined with some acoustic guitar elements which comes in a bit at the end. The latter three of these ended up scattered throughout the final LP ("Blknailskin" was completed later, to be included on the "Triad" compilation that is now available via BandCamp, as a sort of b-side/bonus track, and more recently I further morphed it into something new for my This Dark Shroud 2023 LP, "Vanity"). 

About "Abstrackt Distractions" (paragraph 2)

The LP also included one of my recorded live-at-home recordings, done in one take, a lengthy medley where I am talking/playing at turns, a little like I had done for the "022623" medley, yet this medley is almost completely different, not to mention that it was in fact this time a completely off-the-cuff improvisation, filmed with the iPhone as a video recording, the sound later extracted, tweaked in LOGIC, and added to the new (previously unplanned-for) LP. The date of the recording for this track is "022023," six days before my 50th birthday, and I put the date in the title. Another "dated" track (the final one I recorded that ended up on the LP) came literally 48 hours before my birthday, on the eve/morning of Feb. 24, which also happened to be the very anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine (though certainly not an occasion which called for any sort of celebration, as the term might seem to imply). This particular improvisation was recorded in LOGIC, with true separation of all audio elements, and I later added some electronic backing -- which was actually the Ukraine piece from exactly one year prior, run in reverse. It consists mostly of spoken word atop some very abstract guitar and additional organic sounds, and in it I talk about the ongoing war, the plummeting economy, and some other things around health and aging as well. 

The title track, too, consisted of a long improv, and again it included some electronic samples plucked from my own backcatalog, with some added beats and a spoken word track taken from a recent talk I'd done for my YouTube page blended into the mix. This improv I entitled "An Abstrackt Distracktion," the LP itself becoming"Abstrackt Distracktions" (plural), and then, just days before my 50th birthday and the release of "0226" (the title quickly adjusted to read "022623," literally two days before publication), I got the second and third parts of the now-completed series into my distributor's online distribution system post-haste, quickly adding numbers to their respective titles to denote that they were a sequence (01., 02., 03). And then, and then, and then...days later, all three of the LPs, including the long-running double, were released in rapid succession, one per day, right up until the very end of the month of February this year.

Did anyone notice this?

 

Well, now at least you, dear reader, know.

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.)