music times
Hello everyone. The news is that there’s some new music for you to listen to if you like. What follows is a description of the album making process. Maybe that’s of interest? If it’s not, you can just scroll down to the links to the album.
If counting the initial sketching of guitar riffs, I started working on this album in the late winter / early spring of 2024. Maybe earlier. That sketching part is just playing guitar randomly and stumbling upon sounds that I like. Once I accumulate enough pieces I think to myself, well shit, I guess I have to make another album. It’s enjoyable but it’s also a lot of work and time. So it’s kind of like hooray, but also kind of like a resigned sigh.
I record the guitar parts first, then the drums, then the bass, and then the vocals. I used to kinda just say good enough and blast through the non-guitar instruments, but now I’m trying to spend more time on each of the additional parts than I did in the past. Attempting to replicate the process of developing songs as a band over time. Play things over and over again so that they change into the correct form. Guitar recording was between November of 2024 and I think April of 2025. Drums were a summer project May through August. Bass was early fall and vocals were done in like October-November.
I won’t go into too much detail about the mixing process, but that started in October with rough mixes so that I could do the vocals and get a basic understanding of how things sounded. I spend more and more time on this part of the deal as I learn more about how to do it. Turns out EQ is super important and both simple and complex. Also ear fatigue is legit. I’m happy to answer any questions about mixing if you wanna geek out about it. I equally hate and love it.
I really struggled with the art for this one. I kept trying to do something with different blockprinted scripts and designs, but after various test prints (and carving linoleum blocks) I said fuck it, this isn’t working. I went to the old standby of desktop publishing/design based on a photo I took and my handwriting.
Something new this time around is that I made a zine to accompany the album so that there’s some sort of physical document of it. The zine is the collected lyrics and counts as the third issue of System of Repetitions. It’s quarter sized and 28 pages. As per usual, if you’d like one just let me know and I’ll send it to you.
So, that’s the new album. I feel pretty happy with it and hope you enjoy it, feel free to tell me what you think. You can find it at the following links:
I truly hope you are doing as well as can be. There is so much intensely awful capitalist-human created bullshit that we all have to deal with.
Fuck ICE
Free Palestine
Keep loving and keep fighting!
Keith