I recently put out a very short collection of music called Brief Inhalation. The suddenness of its release and brevity of its content was partly due to how the music on it just didn’t spiritually match the rest of the music I was close to finishing.
That other stuff is now—after many years, actually—finished, and it’s being released on December 18th, 2020 as Algorithms & Archives.
While this release represents a fairly dramatic shift in how I’ve conducted myself under my Dereification “avatar”, it’s almost disingenuous to emphasize how radically new this music will be (though it is also that, for the moniker at least).
This is because various aspects of Algorithms & Archives are a long time in coming: not only were these pieces of music written between 2008 and 2012, but—after letting them collect digital dust for far too long as neglected tablature files—I’ve been anxious for a couple of years to sit down and finally produce them properly… or however “properly” my approach counts as.
These songs were written in one tablature program or another with no practical intention of learning and recording them by playing the instruments myself. And having listened to these compositions a number of times over the years via the highly mechanical-sounding default playback options in these programs, it would feel odd to me to produce these pieces of music in a completely “organic” manner anyway.
Thankfully, virtual instruments for the instruments involved can be pretty convincing these days. So, I finally used them to produce these songs in a way that balances their original stiltedness (which I’m frankly just too familiar with to abandon completely; that’s just what these pieces have always sounded like to me) with a fuller and somewhat more convincing sound. Vanishingly few changes have been made to the original compositions, with one big exception…
Because another thing that’s a long time coming (but is entirely novel under the Dereification banner) is vocals.
I’ve been putting out music under this name since 2014 and I’ve never created anything with lyrics until Algorithms & Archives: “Escaping Gravity”, which I wrote in 2008, has a pretty traditional verse-chorus structure to it (whereas the other tunes are more like brief sketches), and this inspired me to create a non-instrumental version of this song using its original title as a jumping off point for the words. Algorithms & Archives begins with the original instrumental version, and the EP ends with this new iteration of the song, using vocoder-delivered lyrics that I wrote a couple of months ago. In addition to being indelibly and eternally influenced by the whole aesthetic of Cynic’s Focus (a rare example of a metal record with vocoder vocals), the vocoder vocals are a choice I made to establish the song’s vocalist as a character. This use of characters and—at long last—words are two elements which I hope to make an important aspect of more Dereification music moving forward.
I’m also eager to continue dusting off old compositions like those found on Algorithms & Archives, producing them in a similar way. Even being somewhat selective, I think I have one or two more releases worth of similar music I could put together, so I hope to find the time for that in addition to the brand new and increasingly lyrical music that I would create less retrospectively.
Algorithms & Archives will be published on Bandcamp and streaming services on December 18, 2020. Also, from December 18th through the end of 2020, all Bandcamp sales of Dereification music will have 50% of their price (so, before any fees) donated to the Philadelphia Bail Fund.