Burning my electronica bridges

There's a page in my notes that says "finish album by December 2024" 😃!
Sometime around fall 2025 I looked at that page, crossed the line out, and wrote "hey let's try to finish an album by fall 2025" 🤔. The album came out in early March 2026 🤨.

I'd been making little pieces of music for at least fifteen years...loops, field recordings, synth lines I improvised once and saved, old vocal takes, whatever I found interesting and hit record on. No tracks or songs ever got finished, they just went into folders.

For a long time I felt fine about that because of something Brian Eno said. I read somewhere that he only finishes a piece when there's an actual reason to, so he's got a big pile of begun things, and when a film or a commercial or a museum calls he goes through the in-progress work, finds something that fits, and finishes it for that. I learned last month that DJ Muggs does the same thing.

That system only works if you're in that world. I used to be a recording engineer helping bands make albums, and a theater sound designer, but I stepped away from that work years ago and now write software full time. So all these things I started sonically had nowhere to go.

At some point I asked myself if I was ever going to finish and put anything out, or if I was just going to keep making tiny things never turn into full tracks...and it turned out I did actually want to finish an album. I aimed to complete about thirty minutes of music, and decided no new gear and no new software until it was done.

But how was I going to complete 30 minutes of music? Do I make new tracks? Use some of the old ones?

Then I heard a story that made me want to stop fiddling with these tiny pieces, and instead finish them or delete them and start fresh. The idea that worked for another artist came from a Lil Wayne story. He found out Jay-Z didn't write his lyrics down, he just made them up on the spot to the beat, and Wayne wanted to be like that. But Wayne always carried a notebook around full of lyrics, so he figured the only way he was going to be rid of it was to use up every lyric he'd already written, so it wasn't available to him anymore. He went into the studio and recorded one long song going through the entire notebook. That's the track "10,000 Bars". You can actually hear him in the background ripping pages out and throwing them in the trash.

That's what I decided to do with my folders of recordings: go through all of it and use it up. I took a couple of days off from my day job and spent them on this, and I gave each track about an hour of time to work on - if it was going somewhere in that hour it made the album, and if it wasn't, it got cut.

And I'm really happy with it!

They're moods more than songs. One has singing on it, a couple have vocal noises, the rest are instrumental. One is restless dread, one is the feeling of trying to catch a ship that's already leaving, one is deliberately unpleasant and glitchy, one is pleasant and naive with everything resolved.

It's on Bandcamp: nothing left by No Drift. Spotify and Apple Music too, but Bandcamp is the one I'd point you to.