My studio is set back up!  Ok, so “studio” is a bit of a stretch.  It’s really just a computer desk in the corner my basement with some synths next to it and some studio monitors.  But hey, whatever works!  Being back and working on music feels great.  It’s always been a creative release for me, and so not being able to work on music usually leaves me feeling bottled up.  My first two priorities since getting things set up are working on treeFungus stuff (the joint project my friend started), and finishing a new Partition 36 song tentatively called “Alice”.

The new Partition 36 song is part of the new album, which I briefly talked about back in this post.  As I mentioned there, the album is sort of a reverse Inside The Beat, where it starts as a very inward-facing, personal album, and then moves outward.  “Alice” fits the introspective side of it perfectly.  The pseudo-lyrics I’ve been working on for it are based on a poem I wrote at the beginning of the year, and deal with my feelings as I came to terms with being transgendered.  What I’m thinking of doing is recording them in either a whispy/whispery voice and then applying some effects to make them sound ethereal, or doing something on the verge of spoken word and then doing some heavy processing.  Either of these should fit well with the song, which is already pretty atmospheric sounding.

Aside from that, I’m thinking I may do some remastering work with some of my old pre-Partition 36 pieces in order to practice some new engineering tricks I’ve been researching.  Furthermore, some of my old master CDs have been scratched, and I don’t have the original master files anymore, so making new recordings will also serve an archival purpose.  These shouldn’t take long at all since everything is written really just needs to be re-recorded into a multi-track master, and they aren’t a priority.  But expect a few to be released here through the blog.

Music is the salt that cleans the wounds of the soul.  It’s the reflected image we see when we look at our inner self in a mirror.  It’s the scalpal that we use to perform surgery on our inner selves.  And it’s the map that guides us on our toughest journeys through life.

You may not have noticed, but Inside The Beat had an interesting flow.  The songs at the beginning of the album were more “shallow” sounding, and were more focused on simple beats and rhythms rather than meaningful timbres and arrangements.  I think I mentioned it before, but this was all done on purpose.  Inside The Beat was meant to be a journey from the outside inward, where you’d get a sampling of all the different rhythms, beats, sounds, and themes that constantly bounce around in my head.  But what I didn’t mention was that, with a few exceptions, the songs are mostly arranged chronologically by the order they were written.  “Chrystallis” was composed very early on in the album’s life, while the remixes at the end were literally the two last songs I completed.  Truth be told, this was an accident that happened to work.

I did quite a bit of introspection in my personal life as I got closer to finishing Inside The Beat.  In a way it was ironic.  While the album was meant to move from the outside-in beat-wise, it was also moving outside-in for me personally, and I think it got reflected in my writing.  Pretty much everything after track six reflected the start of a journey I took inward.  Things slowed down and started sounding more contemplative.  Inside The Beat was really going inside the figurative beat of my soul.

The first paragraph of this entry, the one in the block quote, is something I wrote as a “working premise” for my next album.  Where Inside The Beat was about moving inward, my next one will be about working through what’s inside, and then emerging.  To put it another way, Inside The Beat moved outside-in, and the new one is moving inside-out.  I think this is already reflective of the first few test tracks I’ve written for the album.  Both of them are quite introspective and contemplative (think along the lines of “Face Toward The Horizon”).  I’ve also been working on writing something that resembles lyrics, but isn’t quite the same thing.  These vocals will hopefully add some new depth to my music and really emphasize the “inside-out” journey theme that I’m working from.

So… yeah, we’ll see where this goes.

After thinking about it, I decided the easiest way to keep my old blog posts around was to simply move them to a different subdomain.  So they can still be accessed from oldblog.partition36.com (which is also a link on the right).

Aside from that, I’ve been bouncing between a few things lately, trying to decide what to work on next.  There’s two new songs in the pipe, one of which is more of a trance song, while the other one is more of an EBM/electro-industrial track that draws influence from Skinny Puppy and Front 242.  I’ve also been playing around with some more downtempo stuff.  Nothing concrete yet as to what these songs will end up being part of, but maybe something will develop.

I’m also still working on plans for doing a live show.  Work on that got to be a bit slow since I was trying to finish off Inside The Beat, but now that it’s out the door I can work more on how I’m going to play this stuff live.  In truth I’m torn between two approaches.  Do I make it where it sounds closer to the CD, but with more structural changes/surprises, or do I do almost a live PA thing?  Or both?  There was also talk between a friend of mine about making the first concert a fund raiser for Wikileaks, which would be awesome and support something I firmly believe in.

Either way, there’s some great stuff coming up from Partition 36.  In the meantime, you can still show your support by purchasing my latest album, Inside The Beat!