Here is a brief update on some of my recent musical activities.
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I decided at the end of May (2023) to revive the dark Gothic-Industrial solo side-project I had originated in 2018, This Dark Shroud, as mentioned a few times earlier in this essay/book, recording and arranging a short, very beat-heavy electronica EP of 24 minutes that grew into a 10 track, 45 minute-long LP entitled "Vanity." The LP is now available on all major streaming services under the artist name “This Dark Shroud,” and the video I recently created for the title track is below.
“Vanity” music video
Initially I had created a second LP called “Fleshy Air," with a red jacket, but then, even more recently (it is now July as I again update this section), after rearranging some of the things on that LP and also doing new versions of "Black Nail" and "The Dial Is in the Bathroom," as well as "What They Did,” I reentitled the LP. (It now also now includes an electronica-style cover version of IAMX's "North Star," as well as a cover of How To Destroy Angels’ "A Drowning.")
I performed as This Dark Shroud (solo) for the first time since 2018 on June 14, and for the first time ever in Tokyo, and earlier this month I did a "one-man" solo performance as TDS as well, though, not surprisingly, the crowd was rather small, and half of the people who had come for it left between the two sets I had prepared, so I ended up performing a shortened "second stage" to, essentially, two kindly friends and the soundperson. (Tonight, July 21, I will perform as TDS at Kichijoji NEPO using video projections, by the bye. I do not expect a large turnout, but it really isn’t the point for me anymore.)
This Dark Shroud live in Asagaya, Tokyo.
I eventually ended up doing a new video for this year's version of Broken Glass, called "Brknglss" on the LP. On the evening of what had been Father’s Day, I went out to get some dinner and, as I was returning to my apartment in the rain, I had an image of the line that goes "You're crying again" (note that, in the original recording of "Broken Glass" from 2018, it was "Crying like a babe"). I decided that once I got back to my room I would scour the web for free-to-use footage of people crying, and that is what I did, putting most of the clips I had found into stark black and white and trimming the images to emphasize the eyes of the crying people, rather than their faces entire. In the latter portion of the video, I blended in some of my own footage.
I also recently made a new video for the new version of "Black Nail" that will appear on the forthcoming TDS LP, which, by the way, is entitled "9," as it now has nine tracks (it runs for a total of 50 minutes). I took sections of the original Black Nail video my bassist J and I had filmed back in 2018, cut, reeffectorized, and reshuffled the parts, and in many cases I slowed the video down and/or ran the forward parts in reverse, with the "reverse" parts from the original, then, now running forward... I did all this against the slightly faded backdrop of the album cover for the LP "9." This was followed by an updated video for “The Dial Is in the Bathroom,” which I will also share below.
Another update I would like to make here, and this is currently available only via YouTube in audio-only format (each individual track was too long to upload to BandCamp), one can now imbibe a three-part series entitled "A Glass Sun: Bricolages (2017-19)," consisting of three "suites" of roughly one hour each that combine older recordings I had found either on my HD or in iCloud, with tracks fading in/out and/or flowing into each other, and with some parts mixed or blended together in new ways, overlapped and/or edited/reedited, etc., to create a sort of storyline/sound collage of my past life/lives from my Fukuoka days. The work, as mentioned above, is subtitled "Bricolages: 2017-19," which I felt appropriate for what they are: collages, tapestries, a sort of DJ playlist for a ghost radio broadcast, broadcasting past sounds in a way that feels fresh and new. The styles found here are pretty much all styles I had been working in post-band/post-label (2017~) up through pre-pandemic times (late 2019); in other words, solo material made prior to 2020's "Untitled." There are some songs or parts of songs that were originally recorded as This Dark Shroud (solo) here as well, by the bye, and the second and third parts include some guitar and/or acoustic (vocal) material, some of which I excerpted, "remixed" and/or reedited as separate tracks, and compiled in their (sometimes slightly changed) forms on a compilation called "Revisited," which also includes the version of "Coda" I recorded on the day I did the "Man & Machine" sessions, along with version of "Coda" I'd recorded back in around 2018.
My latest release is “Solitude.” It is available for preorder at my BandCamp page, and will be released via streaming services soon.
I created a video for the LP’s experimental opening track, which I will share below. Much of the LP is quiet, and there are three piano pieces included, one original and two covers, one of which is Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Solitude.”
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Earlier in this essay, I had said that there were a number of unpublished fiction writings on an old computer HD that I could not access, due to a lost password, and that this collection of older writings included a couple of novel-length works. Well, lo and behold, very late on the night of Sunday, June 4, whilst cleaning my apartment from "head to toe" (I started early in the morning and finished at around 1 a.m. -- this activity was mainly started because a bed was delivered to my room at around noon on that day, the first bed I have ever owned, literally, as a single man!), a small black USB drive fell from what must have been some other galaxy almost directly into the palm of my hands.
Seriously.
When I looked at the contents on the drive the following morning (Monday, June 5) via my MacBook computer, I discovered that I had saved every single (or, at least, by the looks of it, nearly every single) piece of worthwhile fiction writing I had ever done starting in 2004, the year I finished my first M.A. degree in Japanese Literature at University of Colorado, all the way on up through 2011, one year after graduating Brown University with an MFA in Creative Writing, and also my first year living and teaching literature in Fukuoka at university (to put this further into context, 2011 was a mere two years before I had had that first meeting with the guitarist of what would become the band Chattering Man; speaking of...there was a short story I later discovered/ rediscovered in the 2011 folder on the USB drive entitled "Chattering Man," though the theme of the story had/has absolutely nothing to do with music or with the band, which hadn't in fact yet existed at the time I wrote it*).
I had thought all of this stuff was gone, possibly forever, locked away in a vault to which I no longer held the key.
I was wrong about that.
And so, while it is true that "Nothing lasts forever," everything eventually comes back around in its turn.
After all, I never would have imagined I would again be recording and performing as This Dark Shroud.
* Perhaps I will add that piece, below, in the addendum! I also have some other short-short fictions that later became songs from around that time, such as "City of Masks" and "Phantom," by the bye.
2023年7月7日金曜日
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.
2023年7月3日月曜日
This is NOT from the essay -- unrelated post today.
I have been high on electronica all day. From the minute I woke up until now (it's nearly midnight, and I am ready to shower and then collapse into bed, so that I can wake up and go to university in the morning to teach all day tomorrow), I have been immersed in MUSIC: recording, mixing, arranging, playing back the mixes as I hung my laundry and made coffee, lunch at 2 p.m. (still listening), more tweaking, three hours in the studio, dinner at 9:30 p.m. (playing back some of the rehearsal video, from which the screenshots I'm sharing here were taken), then back home to tweak and retweak...
Awesome.
In addition to the beats and noisy electronica stuff, I also did a rather (I felt) cool improv combining ambient backing (well, there's the electronic stuff, after all!), piano (semi-electronic, since it's a synth/keyboard), and acoustic guitar (there's the NON-ELECTRONIC I was referring to!) that I am looking forward to trying out on Wednesday in some form. It's a somewhat new sound for me, maybe. I'm calling it TDS 2023 sound... An additional style to develop this year. You can hear something like it on a recent YouTube video for what was originally called "Bird," then changed to "Broken Wing" in 2021. This is this year's semi-improvisational style, with dark electronic backing tracks. It was recorded, as you see it, live in my room in one take, then later mixed in LOGIC with the backing tracks added in.
The beat-heavy stuff just feels so damn good, and I've been wanting to do a pure ELECTRONICA cover version of IAMX's "North Star,"* which I arranged acoustically last year (and very much enjoy playing it that way, still)...so, finally, now, I have, as well as (for fun) an unofficial remix of the original "single edit" version that is different, again, from my solo/cover version that features my own vocals. This stuff gets my adrenaline pumping in the right way. It's perfect music for this hot summer season. If I had a car (a Tesla? haha) I'd want to blast it with the roof off -- or maybe use it TO blast the roof off!! I'll maybe do straight "beat-less" Eno-ish** ambient stuff again, as well as looser acoustic tunes in the winter, when I am hibernating as I did last January/February, i.e. around the time I was turning 50 and did my "Triad," that has hardly any beats on it at all.
*The new version of "North Star" will be available in some form publicly soon. I have not shared it ANYWHERE yet, so hang tight, please. Ditto for the remix.
**Though honestly I much prefer Sakamoto/Alva Noto/Fennesz to Eno these days -- his stuff, frankly, is starting to sound to my ears very dated and "safe."
I am feeling a bit, perhaps, like Bowie must have felt when he made albums like Outside at around the same age as I now am, a year or two younger, actually... He was drawing much of his inspiration, as he says in the EPK from 1995 for "Outside," from his collection of previous work, his catalog/ouevre, to create something that was both new and also "in conversation" with what came before, all the sounds and themes and characters, those things he made when he was younger, and perhaps less wise (he was off the drugs/alcohol by '95, and taking life day by day, happily married and with his second child, etc.). I mean, as an artist, I feel an affinity with him, though I have never tasted even a hint of the fame he had, nor what it must be like to release something and have an instant audience for it (go ahead and argue with me... No, Outside didn't sell the way Let's Dance or Ziggy Stardust did, but he had fans and listeners and an audience), not to mention that a "world tour" (that made him money) would have been just as obvious as my waking up to teach classes or grade exams, and hooking up with the likes of Trent Reznor, too, was just as easy (pick up the phone, call, "Hey Trent, wanna do a tour together?"), etc.
But this is NOT my point here.
My point is that doing "Black Nail" now, doing "The Dial Is in the Bathroom" now, recording new versions of "Broken Glass" and "(The) Fleshy Air" this year and bringing the dark-techno of This Dark Shroud back again this year, after a 4-5 year hiatus from it (five since I did it solo, four since This Dark Shroud with my friend Joe as bassist played our last show, though that really was a separate project, despite using the name), whilst adding in more elements of ambient, noise, improvisation, and all of the other genres I've been doing in the intervening years... It just feels so RIGHT.
That no one around me now was there at the time to recall or see how things have progressed (well...not in Tokyo, anyway) or has knowledge per se of the history behind the material I am now doing in new arrangements and as, essentially, "new songs" is not important. What IS important is that this project feels like fire to me. I've got plenty of tinder here to burn, and each time I ignite it -- or it ignites me -- something is different and new and exciting (and when I say "tinder" I don't mean that s*** dating app that might come to mind when I use the word, I mean, you know...FIRE, baby!!!).
Long Live the Shroud.
The Shroud IS my band. It is my alter-ego, my Ziggy or Nathan Adler, maybe. Or, well...no.
It's my Muse. Not a character in a story. It's pure energy, both dark AND light.
I don't get recognition for any of this music. What I get, instead, is something much greater.
