I Remember Tomorrow, A Prologue

Im not sure where to begin, so why not start with the ideas themselves. I fear I can’t NOT ramble about this project.

I made an album of original music over the course of a few years time; its working title was “Transient Transit: A Love Story” but it felt a little punny so I shifted the name to “I Remember Tomorrow” which is in line with its theme. I first thought I would release this back in 2017? That sounds about right. Any time I would get close I thought to myself, “not yet John, there is still more that can be done… maybe”.

The music itself is minimal, built from fleeting moments of inspiration and contain mostly first take recordings made after toying with one synth or another while sitting in a car, or staying a few minutes too late at home before leaving for work. The music really took shape when I started to experiment with coupling music I was working on with old field recordings.

For as long as I can remember I have been recording soundscapes of places I travel to, while walking, while sitting at train stations, while in a mall or under a bridge, places I would photograph or simply admire for their tone and audible depth.

I remember, wow has it been this long, maybe 15 or so years ago wanting to start a podcast of nothing but field recordings and seek out people from around the world to help build a collection of sound for others to explore. A feed of recordings to discover somewhere new, largely in our imagination and discover similarities and differences in our lives from afar. Could have been fun right? (*Folds up that note and places it in back pocket).

Then there is the music. I have been noodling with electronic music for nearly half of my life at this point. I will admit it’s partially because I never managed to learn to play a proper instrument. I was always drawn to its infinite scope. There are no rules to define what it can be or what it sets out to accomplish. Exploring sound, texture, rhythm, and experimenting with how these things can connect us to an emotional space outside of traditional means has always interested and inspired me.

One idea that I have long gravitated toward is creating music to pair with my field recordings. Ideally in a way that the music becomes part of the landscape of that recording or perhaps amplifies the memory of them in some way. I have long ruminated on ways to do this and never had the time or maybe the skill to dedicate to the idea fully.

Once I started to build this album I realized that it was telling the story of an important part of my life so I started to play the album as it was at the time with an empty page in front of me and write. Memories poured out as I heard these sounds and the days in which they were recorded came back to me as I wrote. The result is a short story of sorts about love, the beauty of bright moments, and the way memory rearranges our own interpretation of time.

The whole project has been more or less finished for well over two years now yet I have been tripping over my own feet trying to find the right time to release it, probably as an excuse NOT to. It gives me nothing but anxiety to even think about sharing it for whatever reason. It feels like it’s mine as it is and I kind of like that, but sharing it feels inevitable. It was tailored more or less specifically for me so releasing it out into the world feels kind of weird.

I can’t count how many times I have put this album on and listened to it in its entirety as a means of personal escape. It’s naturally ambient in nature so it suits moments of reflection and work. I have listened through in quiet spaces on headphones as well as isolated on a nice set of speakers and it always manages to help bring me a little bit of solace.

Now, onto the physical release. I have notes from years back on design ideas and mock ups. Most of what I ended up with fell into place a couple years back during those surreal weeks at home with family as the world tried to figure out how to live with this new viral threat.

As soon as the story started to take shape I knew that I would be making a zine to pair with the album full of photos and the writing. At first it was just the zine and a digital file but eventually that turned into lathe cuts and cassette tapes as well.

After prototyping the physical booklet at home, I discovered that I could save a significant amount of what would have been a bigger investment than I could justify for a personal project by more or less ordering all the pieces for its release then assembling it at home (Collated printing for the win). I also bought custom length blank cassettes and blank o-ring covers for them thinking, “oh I’ll just dub these myself!” Somehow forgetting that I would be dubbing them in real time, one by one. Not to mention the design of the sleeves which thanks to YoungDoo and her brilliance we found a unique and beautiful solution for but maybe more on that later.

OK, OK, OK. I did warn you I would ramble. This whole thing has just been such a long time coming.

The whole project is sitting here next to me, zines are printed and bound, they just need folding and trimming. The cassette tapes are half way finished, still have a number of them to copy. The covers for them are done. The lathe cut 7” vinyls containing two of the tracks are ready to roll with clear sleeves and accompanying double sided print. The digital copy is already uploaded, PDF version of the zine ready. Heck, I even released a “teaser” music video for one of the tracks! Remember that? kind of feels like I should just get these things out into the world right? Right.

I will either put these up for order here on my site or maybe just on bandcamp though they take a much bigger cut than Gumroad does. I may or may not look into publishing on streaming platforms but it feels rather silly do bother. I’d rather just make the digital version available at a low cost. What do you think? Either way, I am publishing this now as a way to break the ice, move on, and get these things ready to ship out the door. Finally.

Never-Ending Ever After

Years of collecting bits of audio, video, and photographs have all been poured into my newest project. An album of music set to field recordings made while traveling over the past 10 years of my life, most of which has been with my wife, YoungDoo, by my side. The physical release is as much a part of the album as the music itself. It contains a short story with photographs in a small hand bound zine as well as a cassette tape with a cool cyanotype sleeve, and a lathe cut record containing two of the tracks from the album.

I have been chipping away at this release and the ideas behind it for somewhere around 3-4 years at this point. Slowly but surely it has evolved to this point. It’s a love letter, a slice of life, a meditation, a way to break away from reality and join alongside another. It’s a story about memory and our relationship to it and to each other. It has ended up meaning a lot to me and it’s a package that will be available soon and I could not be more excited to finally bring it to life for others to enjoy.

The music video embedded below (Or link here directly to YouTube for full quality etc.) is the first taste of the album and is presented with a loose collection of videos taken while in Korea, Japan, and India.

See you again soon.

4.20

Back with another monthly release! I will admit this one is a little self indulgent. I was inspired by some of my favorite ambient music releases which feature intimate soundscapes layered by found sound, improvisation, and honesty. What feel like imperfections are often intentional and each sound was either knowingly recorded or gently manipulated with a minimal hand.

This month has been a strange one, we can all admit that right? I chose to take advantage of all the time spent out in the sun with my daughter Milla and started to pull out the voice recorder app on my iPhone to record stretches of time spent with her. Once I noticed how nice it was to collect moments this way I started bringing out musical instruments here and there to include in our outings. One day it was the Pocket Piano, another day Milla chose a harmonica, and one afternoon in the back yard I brought out the OP-Z to control my Roland JP-08 and Pocket Piano.

During that last recording the JP-08 battery died while I had a nice little loop running as Milla and I relaxed in the shade so later on that night I pulled out a cassette tape 4 track and made another variant to the looping rhythm I had made earlier that day using the built in delay on the JP-08 and again controlling it with the OP-Z. The cassette added a nice texture to the loop and I layered this under further recording of that afternoon as the spring breeze made its way through the treetops.

I have fallen asleep to this recording a number of times since finishing it. I love the way it turned out and may explore this idea more down the line, recording little live improvisations in different environments and seeing where they lead me. It’s such a relaxing thing to do as long as Milla’s patience manages to hold strong.

Thanks again for tuning in, I hope some of you enjoy it. As a bonus I have included a desktop of the album art photo. You can’t quite make out the toy watch face in the photo but it reads, “IT IS NOT TOO LATE”. Something we picked up in Seoul years back.

Bandcamp Link here.

See you again next time.

Monthly Music

There is a lot that has snuck under the radar here on 50ft this year. Mainly because I have not had time to focus on fixing a few issues I have had in the backend. What little social media posting I do is all I have been doing to connect with the world at large and while traffic here is pale in comparison to where it once was I know there are many of you who still come by regularly and I love you for it. So, let’s catch up, starting with music, original music that is.

You may remember a year or two ago I released some original music on cassette tape. Most of the music I make at home or while out and about is made for me, experiments in sound, texture, or rhythm. It’s relaxing. Oddly enough, sharing music makes me feel quite anxious though. It feels personal in a way thats tough to explain, but on the other side of the coin it feels important to push myself to share some of my creative output in light of not having a daily shooter for digital photography around at the moment.

I have decided to see if I can release new music once a month this year, sometimes ambient, sometimes upbeat, but always something monthly. So far so good, I have two releases up to share on bandcamp, I’ve chosen to make them “pay what you want” to be fair in regards to the nature of the project. Money that is raised I will set aside for printing a small zine I have been working on to be released with a full length album that I have been sitting on for at least a year now and feel its time to release to the world at large.

I have been and will continue to release them on bandcamp, the best place to support independent music online. There are descriptions of each release over there. If you’re interested, here is a link, enjoy!

50Ft Radio Volume Eighteen

New year, new mix! How about that? I just cant give up on this series, I hold it to dear and still get emails about people discovering new music through them so it makes it all worth while. I’ve been sitting on this one for a while and finally had time between life at large to get it up. I figure this is a good way to start the year off. A year that I really am pushing myself to reconnect with the world of 50ft and see if I cant get the ball rolling again. So much unpublished content hiding in this laptop!

This episode is one I listened to a lot this past fall and slowly added the finishing touches to recently. I tried to work it out where it could loop and not feel like your missing a beat and beats are its emotional center this time around for sure. Just steady enough to turn up and dance to and just relaxed enough to sit back and enjoy or work to if thats the vibe. I quite like this music and encourage you to cherry pick your favorites and look into the artists closer if you find something you like.

Thats what this is all about after all! Spreading the word and sharing music and artists you guys may enjoy and connect with too. That said, here’s my usual mission statement on this series: This series is about the love of music and spreading that love with all of you. If you enjoy a song then by all means, look up the artist, buy their music directly from them, go to a show, shake their hand. The closer the better. They can’t keep doing what they love without us.

Links are below for direct download or the podcast feed (yes you need top copy and paste it into your player of choice to follow, but its a tidy way to have all of these in one place!) It is a mp3 file with chapters so you know who you are listening to but I have included a little screen shot of the playlist as well. Enjoy!

*Podcast Feed for your player of choice:
https://fiftyfootshadows.net/feed/podcast

Direct Link: http://50ft.me/J6W75O
Playlist (listen first! why spoil it?): http://50ft.me/wpNH1s

50ft Radio Volume Seventeen

I have wanted to get this posted for ages now, pieced together from music found through the past several months that I have been into and wanted to share. I still love squirreling away tracks into my 50ft Radio Playlists and I finally made time to put them all together to share. Music this time around is another eclectic lot spanning electronic, pop, indie, jazz, folk, and a trip to Africa near the end. As always if you like something, take a moment to check to see who it was you enjoyed and listen to the whole album, better yet, buy it! This series is all about discovery and while I know the music world has changed a lot since I’ve started these I still like to think there is value in curation. Thanks for listening, enjoy!

Podcast Feed for your player of choice: https://fiftyfootshadows.net/feed/podcast/

Direct link: http://50ft.me/90xc6Y

Playlist (Try not to peak!): http://50ft.me/t2sVCU

This series is about the love of music and spreading that love with all of you. If you enjoy a song then by all means, look up the artist, buy their music directly from them, go to a show, shake their hand. The closer the better. They can’t keep doing what they love without us.

50ft Radio Volume Sixteen

I still love making these mixes even if I don’t find time to make them nearly as often as I would like but here we are on Volume Sixteen, still alive and kicking since 2010. I’m the turtle of online mixes/podcasts. This time around I have assembled a broad strokes kind of collection that will hopefully lead your ears to some new sounds. A touch of ambient, a dash of downtempo, a jump to something to dance to, a little indie, maybe a pinch of singer songwriter even. It’s all here ready for your eager ears.

Take my advice, as always, and listen without peaking into the track list, so much more fun that way. Enjoy!

Direct Download: Here

Tracklist: Here

This series is about the love of music and spreading that love with all of you. If you enjoy a song then by all means, look up the artist, buy their music directly from them, go to a show, shake their hand. The closer the better. They can’t keep doing what they love without us.

Still Life

For over ten years now I have been sharing photos, stories, and thoughts on life and technology but there’s one small part of who I am creatively that has not managed to show up among these pages, at least not very much, and that is music of my own creation. Photography and stories come easy, they are universal, focused, easy to accept for a wide audience, but music… music is an entirely different animal. Sharing original music feels so much more venerable to me somehow. A lot of what I have shared here over the years has been to fight a fear of judgement and underlying anxiety about my creative work and this long standing hesitation is no different.

That said, a couple of months ago I decided to shake off that anxiety and share some music I have been working on over the course of the past year. After choosing which music fit best together as an album, working on finishing up a few of the songs, and doing a bit of at-home mastering, I am happy to present “Still Life,” a full length album of my own music. It has heavily ambient leanings and was largely inspired by a desire to collect memories through sound and music.

For those of you interested, I thought I would take a few minutes and let you know a little bit about my history with music making in general, the story behind this collection of music, and the details of its release. Not interested? Thats cool, you can jump over to the release page on Bandcamp here, but if you would like to know more, lets press on.

Electronic-centric music and I go a long way back, to the late 90’s/ Early 00’s when I started to discover how weird and wonderful it could be through the likes of Aphex Twin, Autechre, Nobukazu Takeura, Clark, Four Tet, Squarepusher, and countless others who were paving the way for a new generation of exciting new sounds and boundless creativity. I started making music with a friend of mind under the name A Drop In Silence and we had a nice run making the craziest music our young minds could come up with but life caught up with us and my music making slowed more or less to a halt over time.

About a year and a half ago I found an opportunity to pick up a Teenage Engineering OP-1, a magic little box of synthesis, sampling, and multi track recording, and it inspired me to start setting aside time to create music again. Using the OP-1 along with other portable hardware including the Roland JP-80 (which I forgot to put in my liner notes, oops), Organelle, Volca Sampler, nearly all of the Pocket Operators, a piano, and a cool verb+delay guitar pedal called the Avalanche Run, I started to put together songs from time to time, and by that I mean, whenever I could manage to actually find more than a few short minutes to create something concrete. This simplified the recording process greatly; many of the tracks are first takes and all were recorded on the fly one layer at a time.

Music making has become a meditative processes for me, all of this music was made in reaction to the circumstances at the time each piece was recorded and to accent the theme of this music being about memory and meditation I stated to listen through old field recordings that I made while traveling in Japan and India, and also incorporated sounds from the environments in which I created these songs such as the top of a mountain, inside a diner or coffee shop, or at the shore of a lake or ocean. These recordings ended up feeling as much a part of the music as the melodies and sounds so I left a number of them to have breathing room of their own throughout the album.

Which brings us to the release. I have chosen to distribute this through Bandcamp because I don’t have the time or money to deal with getting it distributed to a wider set of platforms. Bandcamp releases are a big part of what inspired me to put together an album of music and release it to begin with. It is, hands down, the best platform available today for independent musicians and labels. You can stream the whole thing there on the product page before and after purchasing it so I figured there is no need to mess around with the cumbersome mess of Soundcloud or Youtube for previews.

The base price of a digital copy is just $5 and the digital version contains additional “bonus” tracks which are edits to three of the songs on the album that I had made while working on putting the album together and thought they were worth sharing.

Last but not least, I have a physical copy of the album for sale as well that I am pretty excited about! A physical release was something really important to me to offer and because I only wanted to make a small batch of the physical version I knew the perfect format would be cassette tape, oh yes, you read that right. I fully realize that my audience here on fiftyfootshadows contains a large amount of tech elites that will instantly loose track of their eyeballs as they roll out of the back of their heads in bewilderment but hear me out.

The physical release could have just as easily been a rock with my logo stamped on it, it could have been a collectable little sculpture, a USB stick in a funny shape with the music on it, anything, but I chose a cassette tape as the collectable object to sell as a means to commemorate the release which just so happens to also contain a great sounding copy of the album in an analog format. The tapes were professionally duplicated with Type II Chrome High Bias tape and they sound great, truly! It’s a rich, uncompressed copy of the music with a low noise floor and a nicely balanced tone and dynamic range. Scoff all you want, I was pleasantly surprised at just how great the album sounds on the format.

I chose to skip the fragile plastic shell cases and old school J Cards of yesteryear and put together the packaging myself. The cover is a die cut chipboard sleeve made by a great printer in Oregon called stumptown printers. I used a custom stamp as minimal cover art and rounded out the packaging with a photograph, liner notes, and a sticker.  Each copy was assembled and numbered by hand.

The photograph contained in the package is also on the digital cover art seen at the top of the post here. It was an image captured on film while traveling in India. It jumped out to me as a perfect image to represent the album as a whole because of the weight it holds in my memory. I shot it just after waking up on the top bunk of a sleeper class car on a train. The memory of traveling by train in India is distant but has stayed with me though the years as a visceral experience. The dust of a desert blowing through open doors and windows, chai tea breaks at stations, seemingly endless amounts people pooling through the cabins; at times, a peacefulness formed amid the chaos that I often miss. A lot of the music on this album contains memories like this one hiding in the sound and mood of each track.

So thats that! I would greatly appreciate your support in spreading the word of its release if you enjoy it or if you know someone into this kind of music, I don’t often ask but in this case it would be great if you could give me a leg up. I realize its not going to suit everyones taste but I certainly have enjoyed working on it and I am excited to release it into the world.

One last time in case you missed the link, here is is on Bandcamp, if anyone has trouble with the service let me know, I don’t mind considering selling it directly here on the site digitally as well.

Bonus, desktops of the images below are available via the links also below.

Cassette Tapes

*Several months ago I started to write about my newfound affection for cassette tapes but never made time to finish writing it so I decided to pick this back up to finish it and share it with you guys because its all still quite true and since writing this I have fallen even further down the resurgence of cassette tape releases. So lets dig in.

I recently found myself realizing how many cassette tape releases I had collected from small, independent musicians and labels so I took to the net to find an affordable portable tape player so I could put them to better use. I never once thought about it being an outdated format during my dig, I only felt sad that the only new players left on the market are more or less junk which left me searching the depths of eBay for those willing to sell nice old players at a fair price.

My research lead me down a rabbit hole full of old Sony Walkman players among which I was left digging around a specific line of cassette tape Walkmen that I assume were manufactured somewhere toward the end of the tech’s lifespan as a popular medium. I discovered a number of thin, pocketable players constructed from metal rather than plastic and knew I was on the right track. These were actually some really great devices, even by todays standards. Many of the nicer later models were not all that much bigger than the plastic cases that house most cassette tapes. After settling on one that appeared to be in good shape I went digging around the fringes of Amazon for a couple of batteries and a charger to make it work and haven’t looked back since.

After a week or two of carrying it with me from day to day and doing my best not to get pigeonholed as a hipster with vintage tech in one pocket, iPhone 6 in the other, I was surprised at how much I really enjoyed having it around. It lead me to a few interesting observations on the state of physical media today and the illusion of its demise.

I see cassette tapes as an intentional format (in a similar way that vinyl or polaroid film is). It represents a physical connection between music and the listener and causes the listener to be intentional in his or her decision to listen to an album. There are no features to get in the way, just start, stop, and fast forward which could be seen as primitive compared to digital music access but it has the benefit of forcing you to simply leave the music playing and enjoy it beginning to end. Physical media is true fan service.

Looking at it from another angle, cassettes offer me something that vinyl does not, a portable, personal experience to add to the already intentional act of picking a tape or two to take along for the day. While some question the fidelity of cassettes and joke of their irrelevance in todays world, I would greatly prefer listening to a tape over a badly encoded MP3. In fact, later tape technologies were actually pretty well refined and balanced in the full frequency spectrum and had even all but eliminated the tell tale hisssss of older ferric tapes.

There are many of you rolling your eyes right about now and thats fine, I get it, it sounds frivolous at best, surely I have lost my mind. But keep in mind, I’m a romantic. I love the feeling of deliberate fandom in buying a physical copy of an album from a band or artist that I really love and want to support and in some circles there are some amazing artists who have been releasing exclusively on tapes and for good reasons.

The most obvious is the fact that even quality tapes are vastly more affordable to make than pressing records and a lot more fun than selling boring old CDs which may as well be a digital download as far as I’m concerned. Tapes have a long, tried and true presence in the music industry as a method of releasing music independently and have recently been discovered once again as a perfect middle ground for fans of musicians that want to buy a physical copy of their favorite new album but can’t afford to shell out $20 for a vinyl copy.

So, how about you, what do you think about analog formats? I still hold close the belief that if you really love an artists music that you will do more than toss pennies into their hats with streaming services and buy their music outright so why not do so in a collectible and satisfying analog format?