Advection – Arterial

Arterial came about while I was sorting through deep archives of old tracks, sessions, songs, files, sketches, scores, field recordings, sounds. Cataloging old hard drives of unfinished and abandoned material was a project that took me a year or so, and I ended up with about 600 discreet projects in all – ranging from exploratory coding sketches in CSound all the way to finished albums of songs that I’d simply shelved and forgotten about. Some of the tunes in the archives went back to the early 00’s, others were from months prior.

It was a huge vault, and the cutting room floor saw about two thirds of this material get swept up and re-shelved. Still, that left a couple hundred tracks to be kicked out into the world to fend for themselves. Arterial is part of that.

So many nights in my teens and early twenties were spent on tracks like these, up late with a G3 clamshell laptop and PlayerPro or Reason 1.0, just learning how to write. Finishing them in 2019 was a much quicker affair, having a few compositional templates in mind and applying them to a broad range of raw material. Oftentimes two or three sketches would end up transposed and quilted together into a single track. Overall I’m quite fond of how it came together.

It’s a strange thing dealing with such a huge amount of old material. Not just a creative exercise, but also a weird compression of memories, a photo book cut up and reassembled out of order, no longer a time capsule but a weird kaleidoscopic memorial.

The album is best heard as either background noise or a headphone journey. Disc one comprises tracks 1-12. Disc two, tracks 13-22.