Recording is finished on the next smalltime vault album! After a little mixing tweaks and mastering, I’ll be releasing onto the various streaming services over the next few weeks.
If previous smalltime vault albums could be called “inside the box”, then this album could be called “boxes as a concept can eat my whole ass, which is also a concept in this particular example”.
This project is such a drastic contrast from previous releases that I’ve seriously considered releasing it under a different name. But, whatevs. I’ve got this whole infrastructure in place for STV and I don’t have the energy to reinvent any wheels. I couldn’t even think of another name, ffs.
The concept of this album is over 23 years old, I think. I wrote one stream-of-consciousness poem centered around what we associate with the terms “life” and “math”. We often want to think of them as sort of opposites. Life grows chaotically, requiring warmth and sustenance and love. But math is cold and precise, and just as restrictive as a machine’s program.
But life and math aren’t opponents facing off in a ring. There’s a lot that falls into a Venn diagram where the two overlap. Nature has patterns that can be very exact- from the spots on a ladybug to the pressure systems of a hurricane. The overlap that I chose to focus on was the beat.
I’m really not an elctronic music guy. But for no reason at all I’ve always enjoyed trying to make it.
Before I had the real means to do so, I accidentally made a pretty cool instrumental demo of electronic music mixed with real punk guitars and basslines. This was probably around the year 2001 or so.
The demo was never anything that I shared with anyone. It was like a sketch on the last page of a notebook. I thought it was cool but didn’t deem it accessible. So I put it in a pile of “do not throw away”, and that’s where it sat.
Over the next years, I treated electronic music like a half-assed hobby. I was usually a few versions behind on FL Studios and how to use all the plugins. It never felt like a musical instrument, although the potential was always there. I just didn’t keep up.
But suddenly, on some obscure night about eight years ago , I had randomly and quite drunkenly mapped out an entire electronic music project that would revive the ideas behind that instrumental demo.
I had an idea that FL Studio beats could be combined with punk guitar and live bass lines, with the words to that old poem sort of looped and scratched on the top.
And when I say “mapped out”, that’s exactly what I mean. “Song 1- minimal… 3 minutes long… Song 2- introduce acoustic guitar… 3.5 minutes long…” It was like a grocery list of song lengths that included both digital and analog seasoning instruction.
It wasn’t songwriting at all. It was a to-do list from a drunken idiot.
And then it was a to-do list that then sat around with the 48 other ideas that I have rolling around, just waiting for me to care enough to focus on.
*The Director yells into his megaphone, “Quiet on the set!! Queue The Pandemic!! Pandemic on set everyone!!”*
The Pandemic pushed this timetable up. Everyone that used their pandemic lockdown time to improve their home or learn how to bake bread can just go fuck themselves dry twice. I feel zero guilt in admiring you and hating you all the same. That was not where I was at.
Because my lockdown time was a real battle.
My mental health has never really earned any five star reviews, to my knowledge. But being trapped in my house for a year… skipping significant holidays… not being sure if the world and its economy were going to recover…
Yeah. It was just a lot for me.
So while the normal world flooded Home Depot and improved upon their stations in life, I started wrestling with this electronic music concept album.
I bought a legitimate copy of FL Studio like some kind of functional adult, and started banging out tempo maps based on the notes that I don’t quite remember ever jotting down. The idea was that every song would easily bleed into the next, one tempo for the entire album. And the album would bounce between dynamics of analogue and digital. And the poetry that was sampled would underline those dynamics-
Life and Math
At some point it just struck me how easily we view these two things as opposite… but the deeper you look into either concept it’s clear that they have a great deal in common. And the heart beat seemed like a great metaphor for that. It’s pumping life.
But it’s just a counter.
And the music that we make is also pumping life.
But it’s also just a counter. One. Two. Three. And four.
The beat to our songs pumps life like a heart. I wanted to capture that with music that balanced real instruments with digital music.
Analogue vs. Digital. Life vs. Math.
This was the core concept to the poem long before COVID hit us. But as I was trapped in my house, the whole “Life vs. Math” thing really had time to hit me. Especially as we were all checking the daily death counts.
Usually creating songs is sort of an exercise in building a foundation and then adding levels. This to-do list wasn’t like that. It was more like I’d given myself 9 blocks of goddamned grannite, and a rough outline as to how to start chiseling them.
So basically, I spent a lot of time in lockdown chiseling these stupid songs into existence.
And I really enjoyed the process, on a daily or granular level. It was fun. It was therapy. I think it did me some good.
And then the Pandemic ended, although it feels like the madness never really did. So I’ve been poking at finishing up these mixes off and on for the last five years. Sometimes there would be big pushes of effort, and sometimes I was just too busy living life with my family to care.
But here we are, at the end of it. And I admit, I’m still not even sure if this is listenable. It’s not just overcomplicated on a thematic level… the music itself is probably too busy for the average listener. But, I guess I made this album just because I could, and because I needed to on some level.