“Music does a lot of things for a lot of people. It’s transporting, for sure. It can take you right back, years back, to the very moment certain things happened in your life. It’s uplifting, it’s encouraging, it’s strengthening.” — Aretha Franklin

Fob 13

ETHERREAL

2001 album

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 to flesh out the track list. 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 project, 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 she got really cranky with the way I worked, and vice versa, so we just decided to keep our collaborations limited to sex.

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 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.