After a full 2 years of composition (including the eventual scrapping of over 40 minutes' worth of "draft" material) I have a new album's worth of my characteristic infra-music ready to "drop" as the kids say. Here's a preview, along with my late brother's artwork and the usual "justification for existence" blurb. I know I say this virtually any time I do something to completion, but this is likely the best material I've done in this idiom, and if it is the last then I will be happy to bow out with this. I have thrown everything I had at my disposal into expressing the world of 'beautiful confusion,' and I'm confident it will show through on this outing.
If we count only studio-recorded works exceeding 40+ minutes' length as "albums", then this will be my first actual album since 2009's "Strangelet". Life has certainly found many ways to intervene during those many years, including positive developments (4+ published books, some reinvigorating travels, love) and a deluge of negative ones as well (un- or half-employment, geographic relocations, near-fatal car accident, death of friends and family, love lost, global pandemic and near-total loss of social energy that accompanied that).
This will also be the first album that I choose to release in the way I'll outline now. Though I had intended for this to be either a regular CD release or a release in which some merchandise object like a t-shirt + booklet would be the "packaging", the economic reality of unprecedented inflation and shortages in the U.S. simply do not encourage dropping several thousand $ (incl. production costs, mailing of promos to far-flung locales, etc.) on a product that will not likely return anything from that initial investment. For now my plan is, in mid-March or so, to make available the digital-only version of this music with a full digital booklet of art and text. From there, anyone who purchases this will get a voucher good for a physical copy in whatever form it eventually manifests. It just seems that this round-about way of crowd-funding is the best way to go: I am not a wasteful person and this allows me to gauge exactly how many physical copies of this even need to exist.
Having said all that: I would be nowhere at all without the support of friends who have made it much farther down this road than I have. My current clandestine base of supporters can always expand - MUCH weirder things have happened to me - and perhaps with someone else doing the silvery-tongued promotion of this work, it would reach ears I had never expected it to reach. So, prior to this being released in the method I just described, I am happy to provide a full album preview to any current supporters of my work who might be interested in covering some or all of the production costs for this elusive physical version. Just get in touch with me here: tbwb@protonmail.com and we can talk. Not just about this in particular, but other avenues I still want to explore - soundtracking for documentary / structural / narrative film, site-specific pieces etc. etc.
Thanks as always for your interest.