I’m switching to a smaller, but more frequent model of doing things.  For the time being, and possibly the foreseeable future, I’m done releasing these hand-made, physical albums with conceptual themes, experimental packaging, complex liner notes and weird writing pieces.  Instead, I’ll be releasing single tracks on YouTube and and Bandcamp, combined with B-sides and original videos.  The first one on both formats is “Dream,” a droney synth and stripped-down guitar track using MBV-esque vocal tracking.  Another song, “Let Up” is on YouTube and there will be a digital single soon.  I’m working on several different types of music and songwriting right now and will probably be experimenting more than building a large project.  You can subscribe on YouTube to follow the progress.  Most songs will probably go there first.

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Over the past five years, I’ve been — very slowly and sparsely — writing and recording, without a project in mind.  The release show of my last record, Between the Walls and the Sea, morphed into my band, Dalmatian Toadflax, which is on a lack-of-membership hiatus lately.  To be honest, I just wanted to release something physical again.  So ten scraps of disparate work from the last five years is becoming my next record: Obvious and Afraid.

It’s likely that this record will go up on Bandcamp, sit there, and not progress beyond that.  Will there be shows?  Videos?  A cassette release?  Who knows.  I want to say that I’m just going to keep writing, recording and releasing stuff, regardless of any promotional potential or audience response.  I want to, but it feels kinda pointless sometimes.  All I know is that I’m not going to repeat the last five years.

Between the Walls and the Sea is now live on Bandcamp. Tapes ship out by September 25th, and you can pre-order them now.

One of the different things about this album — besides that it took four years to complete — is that I put a lot of effort into documenting the songs and recordings as they developed. I wasn’t in a hurry to get a record done and I sat on the songs for a long time. Back in 2009 I was recording a video demo of every new new song I wrote. More recently I’ve been posting sketches on Soundcloud. I’ve been posting lyrics as soon as a song is written here on Quelquechose, and as they get edited, I’ve been updating the same post with all the edits intact. Further, my Soundcloud has multiple versions of the songs as the recording progressed, so (if you want to — not saying you do) you could hear “Background” without the synths or “Cellar Door” back when it had a much simpler drum track. All of the songs on this new record have a post on this blog that archives the changes that occurred. I was also, for a while, keeping a live to-do list that I published on Twitter, but that fizzled out at some point

So, this album ended up being a songwriting documentary experiment, which you can check out by visiting the lyric archive, where I’ve compiled all of my songwriting posts grouped together by album. You can also view the song lyrics category to view the posts in reverse chronological order.

There’s actually news on the solo project front. My next record is complete. I have preliminary masters for it and I’ll be releasing it on cassette and MP3 in the fall. No physical CDs to start out, but I’m offering the MP3s on my Bandcamp page on a pay-what-you-want basis.

Between 1997 and 2009, I released at least one recording every year. There’s been nothing since then. I wrote a bunch of new songs in 2009 and then tabled them. In late 2011 I started recording some of them. I’ve been working on those tracks slowly since then, and recorded a few new songs along with them. That means I’ve been working on this release for four years. I think it shows. Every step was a very deliberate process, and I’ve gotten to know the tracks very well. This is a very different record from Open or Exits — I’ve gotten pretty enthusiastic about analog synth sounds and keyboards in general, so this record is way less guitar-dominated. There’s also a shit-ton of reverb and drum machine. Warning: the rest of this paragraph is geek-talk. I recorded it all in my room using Cubase LE (which I’m done with — I recently switched to Reaper,) an Alesis SR-18 drum machine, an M-Audio midi controller and a handful of free VST synth plugins. Guitar and vocals were mic’d but everything else was done in the box. A big part of the sound is a result of using the same very wet reverb settings on the vocals and the software synths in addition to a lot of spacey delay guitar. To master for the cassette, I ran everything through a PSP Vintage Warmer plugin and a very conservative limiter. For the MP3s I might add a multiband compressor and a little more limiting to get louder tracks if they don’t sound hot enough. They might be good enough already, I’m not sure.

Maybe this goes against what you’re “supposed” to do, but this record is mixed for headphone listening. I’ve been trying to get it to sound OK in a room with speakers, but when it comes down to me having to choose where it sounds great, I chose headphones. In other words, I’m not sacrificing the headphone sound as much as I’ve done before trying to cater to different listening environments. I’m not that great of an engineer anyways and I think I’m talking about pretty subtle differences, so maybe it’s not worth mentioning. I tried to make the kind of record that I would want to listen to privately, from beginning to end, either in a dark room or going out for a walk.

The in-progress tracks are all currently up on Soundcloud, where I’ve been posting them as they come into being. I won’t be putting the finished tracks up on there. Instead, they’ll go right up on Bandcamp as soon as I finish the “hot” masters (for digital distribution) and the cassette will probably be released at a record-release show.

My last record, Open, is currently available on Bandcamp — also pay-what-you-want. You can download it for free or throw some cash at me to help get the cassette produced. Here’s the link again to go get it:

geraldprokop.bandcamp.com/album/open

Here’s the final track listing for the record:
Between the Walls and the Sea
Side One

1. On a Road
2. Dwell
3. Groundless/Flightless
4. Background
5. Tornado

Side Two

1. Cellar Door
2. Follow Apart
3. Can of Worms
4. Let Go