May I Be Free From This Suffering
The Extended Demos Collection, pt. 2
2019

Hitting the books harder than ever this year; spring, summer, and fall semesters. Started adding a lot of new classes outside of Music Technology, like Business Management and various Arts & Sciences. The money I had gotten from the injury settlement a year before was about gone at this point, so things could get a little tight since I couldn’t work full time while taking all these classes, but I was already too far in to back out now. There were some grants, and I was doing well enough academically to be awarded some scholarships along the way, so bills were paid and no one was starving. Plus, I was still working at the coffee shop a few shifts a week to make ends meet, so it wasn’t such a bad gig. A welcomed change of pace from the last 20 something years of the 40+ hour grind of discontentment, to say the least. I consider myself very fortunate to have been given these opportunities, then and now.

My wife and I got a new studio for her BLACK YO)))GA classes over the summer, where I installed my first pro-audio system and ran sound every week. We loved the last place we had been for the previous few years, but it closed suddenly, and we had to move in haste. Luckily, that owner turned us on to another lady who had a building with an entire floor of unused, unloved space that we could fix up and use for the same terms we had going before. It was a handshake deal which in hindsight turned out to not be so great, but for the 7 or 8 months we got to use the space, it was pretty awesome, and I had started working out greater plans for a future there because we genuinely thought it was going to be long term, but unfortunately, it didn’t turn out like that. Great while it lasted though, and that was this time period.

In the way of equipment, I'd gotten rid of some key ingredients from 2018, like the JD-Xi and the SP-303, but a lot of new things would come in to take their place. There's a photo if you want to take a closer look. Most notably, the Moog DFAM and Mother 32. There probably isn’t a song I’ve made using hardware without one of them on there somewhere since. The Roland SH-01A racks up nicely with the SE-02 and gets a lot of use. More Korg Volcas keep showing up - it’s a love/hate thing with those, but I'm trying to do a lot of different things on a tight budget, so you make sacrifices. A couple of Teenage Engineering Pocket Operators that I didn’t take very seriously and ended up selling, but now that I’m hearing them again, I think I might have made a mistake. Let’s not even start talking about effects pedals, because a lot of those have come and gone, and I miss almost every single one. Which is why I try to never sell anything, but sometimes you just have to, you know?

Musically speaking, despite its sometimes crude and primitive nature, there's a lot of things going on here that I'm surprisingly quite satisfied with. It's a relief to be able to recognize my own improvement from the year before, considering my disposition to generally hate everything that I do. Still technically terrible, of course, but coming along. There’s better mixing and use of effects processing overall, more definitive song structures are starting to appear, and I guess what you could call “my sound” is developing, even if it has to violently bend genres to get there, the style is becoming increasingly evident. And I’ve got to be completely honest, it’s not at all the sound I heard in my head going in, but that’s ok. I'm trying to just let it happen however it's going to happen. If you came here expecting something like “The Enemy Is You” or “Bad Love Clusterfuck” from one of my previous hardcore bands though, you’re probably in for a bad time.

Anyhow, I know the world is a crazy place and there's a million other things pulling at your attention strings every minute of every day, so I really appreciate your taking the time to check it out. Truly.