Nov. 27th, 2022.
This is less of an intentionally cohesive album, and more of a complete hard-drive dump of all the projects I have completed in the past year. Late 2020 found me detoxing and slowly recovering from 10 years of extreme alcoholism, as well as unemployed from all the bar closures during the pandemic. 2021 ushered in a new era of personal sobriety and creativity, as I changed careers and suddenly found myself with more mental clarity and spare time than I ever imagined (due to not being stuck in bars and constantly hungover or in the hospital). This freedom was also daunting, in that I knew I had somehow collected a lot of gear, a lot of ideas, and years and years of vinyl sample libraries … I just had no idea what to do with any of it … and perhaps more than ever in the instantaneous Tik-Tok-famous viral landscape: I had no audience. But, this was also the year that Twelves Wax reopened a store-front in Oak Park after their own 10-year hiatus, just down the street from my house. So one day when I was digging through the crates, DJ Fooders invited me to a new beat-makers/producers’ club called Flip A Beat Club… they would be using the record shop as their headquarters, sampling vinyl, bringing drum machines, generally being music nerds… the whole concept was everything I already did alone, and the timing couldn’t have been better. I started participating avidly, and completed an entire year of monthly submissions. The first 12 tracks are those submissions, in order. FABC became the perfect avenue to meet other producers and to build personal confidence in my own unique production approach. It allowed me to experiment with many different styles in the midst of curious creators of all skill levels that were always willing to offer feedback or lend gear. Early in that same year, q_norapname invited me to play a show at the Barbary Coast dispensary in San Francisco, which would end up being my first live musical performance in 10 years after quitting the guitar-driven band life. Tracks 13 - 18 were my live set for that show. In the summer of 2022 the Club began hosting monthly live showcases, and we were invited to travel to Oakland and LA for several live events. The rest of the tracks were made for those trips, or inspired by them, and appear roughly in the order that I produced them throughout the year. A couple of them were submissions to Blips & Beats (which dealt entirely with video game source material) as well as other online creative forums hosted by Dibia$e or Beat Culture, etc. Eventually, the Club format spread all over the country, with multiple chapters forming in many major cities. For me, throughout this year of personal reinvention, it served to keep me grounded, centered on creation, and constantly looking forward to the next showcase. Congratulations to Mon$rock and Dibia$e for their vision and commitment to the local scene, and for transforming it into a world-wide underground phenomenon in less than a year. A thank you and an apology to all my friends and co-collaborators that listened to my rough-drafts and gave me confused looks or natural honest reactions: Lexy for sitting around listening to terrible records for hours with me, and being incessantly supportive; Anna for tolerating the incessant looping in the living room and sharing food; Carson for the free monitors, showing me anticon in 2004, and instilling in me the earliest avant-garde perspective; Phil for constantly encouraging only the beautiful parts while being straight-up about shit that “couldn’t catch a vibe”; and Devon for showing me how to make proper loops in the first place, back at the Beat Farm in 2010.
I will always dedicate shit like this to the memory of Mark Norton, who loved everything heavy, extreme, epic, shreddy, and brutal. I know he would be incredibly disgusted with the current state of mainstream music, as usual, and would have submitted sinister bangers to every single comp he could find.