2000 ALBUM
ETHERREAL
In the latter part of 2000, I began working on a variety of projects, some for myself and some for other people. It was during this time that I got involved with the Art Of Noise tribute project through the internet mailing list. I ended up doing three tracks for this, the first received a lot of praise. There was a lack of submissions, and so I kept sending in tracks as I had done them, hoping the flesh out the tracklist. I began a fourth track, ‘E.F.L.” but I’ve since lost it, and that is a shame, because it was shaping up to be my favourite.
I also did a remix for Andrew Rothman, who I had met through the AON list, and who was a musician and composer in his own right. Through all of this I began to compile a ‘greatest hits’ collection, for lack of a better term, as my last attempt to market myself. I included some of my favourite tracks from the three albums, and a new remix of Digital that I had just completed. But the whole marketing project fell through before it began due to other considerations.
In addition, I was living with my girlfriend at the time, who was a great singer, and I was working on music with her as a ‘side project’, and we completed one song, a cover of Depeche Mode’s “I Want You Now”, and it turned out very well. We started working on one of her songs, called “So Easy”, but it was never completed.
I was also really trying to suss out the worthiness of trying to update all of my older music and make it sound more modern, and so I was experimenting with that, on tracks like the remake of Digital, and a similar one I did with Acieed Flashback.
So I started working on album number four instead. The original idea for the collection was a return to more simplistic analog sounds. I had been using very full, layered samples and synths, and I wanted to bring it down a couple of levels. Thus, the album is called CTRL as a pastiche on old-tech, and the cover was a close up of the CTRL key on an old VIC-20. My original concept was to name each track after a line of BASIC code that when written into a BASIC compiler and executed would actually do something. The idea didn’t gel, but the name stuck.
When it was done, it was more like an EP, rather than a full album, only 6 tracks, and I added the Digital remix on the end as a bonus track. But the tracks that were on it were well done, I enjoyed making them immensely and they all seem to share something in common acoustically. This collection contains my all time favourite EtherReal song I’ve written, Driving.
Finally, I was also considering a second personal project, something that a couple of the members of Revenant wanted to start up, a VNV-Nation type band, with a female vocalist. So I began to write for that, and to that end I revamped another one of my older songs from the 90’s, and turned it into an EBM club track, called Bloodwork. The band didn’t fly.