It’s on. Points of Departure is on its way to Jamendo.

Indeed, it has been a journey.

I played every instrument on the album, with the exception of the drum tracks. Last time, I used live drums; this time, I used Hydrogen and Renoise for the percussion tracks. I made this decision so that I could make use of a wider range of drum sounds: I only have a minimal kit, and since we’re about to move to Virginia (probably to a smaller house), there’s no point in giving myself a packing problem later. Already I wonder what I’m going to do with the three conga drums.

Jamendo has been good for me. It’s a good home for my music, and a great place to find the type of music I like to listen to.

Today I took a look back at the performance of my three previous albums. Below, I’ve given the download statistics for each of them as of today, March 31, 2008:

For each album, I calculated how many days it has been available on Jamendo. This allowed me to determine the average number of downloads per day. Since evolution was my first album, it makes sense it has the most downloads. However, when the downloads per day is considered, the newest, La vie sous la mer, is clearly in the lead.

None of this would have been possible without Jamendo. Also, I have to give credit to my computer system. I run Linux (a combination of Kubuntu and Ubuntu Studio). There is a lot of high-quality audio software for Linux, all free. Further, finally, a few companies are starting to offer commercial audio products that run on Linux (such as Renoise).

The good news is: Jamendo fully supports free software. Right now, I’m uploading my tracks in .flac format. They will be available for download in both .mp3 and ogg vorbis format (which I recommend). Even the software program I’m using to upload my music, Jamloader 3.0.4, is open source — and even comes Ubuntu-ready as a .deb package!

With all the changes I’m about to go through — ending my life in Florida, starting over in Virginia — the future looks pretty uncertain. Jamendo has been going strong since January 2005. I hope that, wherever I go, it remains my home.

The day is almost here: at the beginning of April, I will be releasing my fourth Jamendo album, Points of Departure.

Yes, I’ve been sparse on WordPress for a while, but I’m about to roll out a big one, so brace yourself.

Cover Art (test 1)

I’ve developed a concept for the cover art, and have an early release. Here’s the first try:

The image is a sort of play on the Pioneer Plaque, the golden plaque that went into space with the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft. (Yes, that’s me on the cover — probably the only time that will happen!) Here’s the basic idea behind the graphics:

The music on this album is all about moments of transition — endings, beginnings, voyages, new discoveries. In a way, that’s been my path through the musical universe. Let me give you a brief preview of some of the songs, and the concepts behind them.

1. Falling Into the Dream — The transition into sleep (something of a battle for me in the old days).
2. Vale Avis Tenebrica — A rather obscure reference. But it’s about my choice not to have children.
3. Let it Burn — A song about Surtr, the Fire Giant who waits in Muspelheim, waiting for the day he can travel north and end the world in fire.
4. Love and War / World on Fire — Believe it or not, this has to do with my wife’s fascination with the TV series Band of Brothers. (And more or less ties into the above tune.)
5. In Memory of Dorothy Blair — Dedicated to my first grade teacher. Hey, she let me move ahead to the sixth grade books that year. By second grade I was reading regular adult novels. She gave me a great start.
6. Casualty of the Battle of the Bands — The explanation: part 1, part 2.
7. The Wind of Distant Planets — I wrote this song for FAWM 2007, but the bass line stayed in my head. Now it finally has meaning: it’s Voyager 1 and 2 passing by the four outer planets — and what it meant to me.
8. Points of Departure –The title track, about the loss of our home in Gainesville as we move to Virginia this summer.
9. Organometallic — Another song from FAWM 2007. It’s part metal. When I was a chemist, organometallic compounds were one of my research interests.

Secret Origins (part 1)

In a way, this album owes a lot to Jamendo artist umbriel rising, and his album extraterrestres.

His concept got me thinking about space exploration, and the dream we were promised after the moon landings, but denied. No cities in space, no bases on the moon: just the 1970’s over again, but with .mp3 players, cell phones, and the internet.

His music also inspired me to investigate a number of synth sounds, which I’ve used for texture throughout the album. In a way, my current projects that involve Csound and Renoise owe their beginnings to this album.

The Future?

Did I mention that the future’s uncertain, and the end is always near? See, that’s why they call me a teacher. Now you know.

If only someone could set that line to music . . . it’d probably open “the doors” to success.

Anyway, I am already planning, believe it or not, the fifth album. I’m going to try some conga jazz again. My second album, handmade, got mediocre reviews — yet has almost gotten more downloads than the other two albums! I guess you can either listen to music or write about music, but not both

But as I said — who knows where I will be. My wife and I are moving to one of the priciest places to live in the country. A year from now I could be living in a cardboard box — and paying $1500 a month rent to do so. Will my conga drums even make the trip? How can I play them, practice them, not to mention record them if I’m jammed into the D.C. area (literally) wall-to-wall with other people?

The odds of the fifth album happening as planned don’t look very good right now.

But four? Four is on the way. Watch for it.

Yes, yet again, I’ve vanished like Brigadoon.

I’m working on my fourth Jamendo album, Points of Departure.  Hard as it is to believe, I’ve spent about 30 of the past 48 hours recording.

I just posted the story, “The Spring Forward Sessions“, to my Dandelife blog.  It has a short preview of the first 9 songs on the album, and even lyrics to one of them.  No audio previews yet, though.

I have a lot to discuss here.  As far as Linux Audio goes, I still have to talk about my music powerhouse program of the year, Renoise.

Although I play most of my music “live” (long, single takes is my preferred method), I’ve used Renoise to engineer most of my percussion this time around.  I wanted to go for a different sound, something modern.  And yet, Renoise is flexible enough I’ve actually been using it to write a pipe organ piece as well.

I’ll have more to say about it later.  Also, I really should mention Csound in a future article.  I’ve been learning a lot about software synthesis.  Then came the day I realized this language — with a learning curve like Superman: the Escape — could easily be the most powerful synthesizer on the planet.  And all of that power is hidden away behind a syntax that combines the expressiveness of technical manuals with the eloquence of assembly language ;-)  Nevertheless, it couldn’t be any other way: it’s too powerful, too close to the bare metal of software synthesis, to be couched in a more contrived and syntax-laden language.

More later.  Time to go walk the dogs.  Sitting in the studio for 16 hours a day doesn’t exactly work the quadriceps.