- Great Plains - 26/09/22
This was my first full-length release on Bandcamp, and I am still quite proud of it. The songs were made from 2019 to 2022, and I made most of it on my old computer on Soundtrap, using samples I found across the web. If you've ever used Soundtrap, you know how primitive it is. Switching to any other DAW makes it feel like caveman tools.
The two earliest songs, "Adjacent States" and "Watermill", are little 1 minute ambient interludes I made on Garageband at school in 2019, I was in the bathroom playing around with synths and chords. I still wish I had some of the other stuff from that old phone.
I didn't really know what I was trying to achieve with this, and that's one of the things I find charming about it. I was just putting together everything I had made onto an album, seeing what I liked the most and what I wanted to keep continuing on and doing.
This was the original album cover for Great Plains. When I think of the album, I still think of this one. I ended up changing it because A - my Dad wasn't a fan, and B - I wanted to put some text on it. For the idea of the album, I was going for a small everyone-knows-everyone type town type vibe, and I think the original picture fit the vibe well. But the other one just looks better in every regard, so I went with that one. It's kinda Black Sabbath inspired.
These three songs were released on Youtube before the album came out, under my old name Nspell, inspired blatantly by NMesh. You can still find my old ep, 12:09, on Spotify, but I don't really associate with it too much anymore, I've moved on mentally and musically. Dave Powers 1 kicked off the DP Extended Universe of songs, where I find old geezers called Dave Powers on facebook and use their face for the single cover. I found the original one on some random site however. Don't know how, maybe fate threw me a redirect.
A Breach of our Reason - 06/08/23
This was my second album, which came nearly a whole year after Great Plains. It was meant to be a tie-in to a film/vlog called "A Breach of our Own", about my city. I hung out with a lot of skaters then and I would film them, so there would be a lot of that. It was shot on a little camcorder, which I took everywhere. I only got ten good minutes out of the day we were in town so I scrapped it. It's a shame because I thought the footage we got was pretty good.
This is definitely my least favourite album out of the three, some tracks are pretty weak (especially the spoken word intro), and there wasn't a whole lot of cohesion. I also didn't include much ambient stuff, which I think is one of the best parts about Great Plains.
This album is a lot more experimental, with tracks like "Historical Speech". I don't know what the end goal for that song was, it was just fueled off of my hatred for Politics and for Ronald Reagan. The track is a speech by him, cut up (inspired by the secret track on Yanqui UXO). Looking back, I just think it's very abrasive and 'trying to be edgy'.
The album cover was a drawing I did, in my "flow art" style. It's just drawing some basic shapes and lines, and I just keep adding to them, with no set outcome.
This was the first thing from this album I released, Dave Powers II. I made a music video for it as well, where I cut up loads of movies and media and put them all together. It was all stuff me and my friends (at that time) found funny, and it's very nostalgic for me. Because this album was created with that short film in mind, I find it very intrisicly linked to me at that time, and the people who I surrounded myself with.
These two songs I released before the album, as a sort of double single, Matsui/Samson. They were heavily inspired by J Dilla and Madlib, and were made in Garageband on my iPhone. I was getting more into complex percussion, and these tracks definitely show that.
Aperire Animo
This is my third album, titled Aperire Animo, which translates to "Open Mind" in english. It is the first part of a project, entitled "ALLs DRY HEAVEN MEGAMIX". If a Breach of our Reason was experimental in the sense of off-kilter beats, then this one went heavily into the ambient side of my stuff. Half of this album has no beats on it at all.
I used a lot of samples from freesound.