I haven’t done an update post because I feel like I do them all the time. Well, it’s actually been a year and a half since anything approaching an update! Weird times on many levels.
It probably feels like that because I’m talking every week on Dat Fury Radio, though I’m not really doing updates there, either. Coming up on six months, and we’re picking up listeners week by week.
So, great googly moogly, here’s the rundown:
- Jam My Wave / Don’t Jam My Wave, the massive 22-song guitar-based project that is succeeding “V for Voice” and “Fight Songs.” Drums are done except for tweaks, bass is done, guitars are close-ish to done-ish; I have maybe six acoustic tracks and 4-8 electric tracks to go, depending on what’s a guest spot and what I do myself. Then keys, vocals, mix. 2026 release at the earliest.
- I’m finishing rollout/promo materials for the three-album “Darker Dimensions” crossover event release, which I’ll start dropping in a couple weeks
- …
- Last month I recorded an album of semi-structured synth improvisations on the Dreadbox Erebus synthesizer; looking at a June release
- The pieces for “23 Infinite Choices” are all composed and recorded. I’m currently adding secondary/tertiary layers of arpeggios and percussion noises to the main pieces. No timeline, but I just bought a Macbook I can load those sessions onto so I can work from anywhere, instead of having to be in the sudio
- “I Am The Brute Squad,” a synth/sampler/guitar record, is complete and ready for a fall release
- I designed and built a parallel loop and EQ pedal, the “Shorty,” designed for dialing in distorted bass guitar tones prior to tracking the Jam My Wave bass last Nov/Dec
- The M/S Ride artwork is all re-done in anticipation of keeping my promise to re-release all that stuff this year
- I wrote “Let’s Drift,” three long psych-rock songs I hope will become a Mars Lights mini-LP, following saying goodbye to our lovely cat Miles Davis last spring, and I recorded the rhythm guitar and bass parts
- I started designing a synthesizer called Mnevis that combines everything Dad likes about his Lyra-8 and modular rigs with some ideas of my own. I’ve sort of sunk myself deep in development quicksand there, both with the size of the project, and with the realization that I might be able to get the oscillators to track V/oct (which was not part of the original design for a more experimental instrument). So I’m currently trying to tweak the V/oct tracking to see if it can work on a single-sided power supply (which I would prefer to use for simplicity and because Mnevis is designed to interface with guitar pedals, so it would be great to run the synth and a couple of effects off of something like a 1Spot)
- I designed and built a couple passive synth modules, a “cascade mixer” (my term) for blending CV signals and a lo-fi diode bridge compressor based on an old design. I used both on the Erebus record
- I got the LepLoop out for a couple weeks and had some good jams, still excited to make a LepLoop record at some point
- I have all the ideas needed to make another Dharmic Beams record, meaning recording the raw material and handing it off to Daniel
Wow, yeah, that’s actually a lot when I look at it all in one place. With the podcast humming along, I’m psyched to get the actual music release pipeline moving again.