New Progressive Overload Release

One year ago, I bought a cheap laptop at Costco thinking of the motto, "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” It may be limited by modern standards, but some of my favorite DnB artists created masterpieces with less. Last October, I wrote this:

“Trying to embody that old 90's idea of the 'dubplate' launching music out into the ether without necessarily polishing it all the way. If you practice realizing an idea on an instrument, it stands to reason that you'd need to do the same, or perhaps much more (considering the number of possibilities) with a DAW.

I have so many sample packs and plugins floating around the computer, I want to just try making music -- any music -- in order to learn this stuff and develop artistically rather than just consuming product.”

These are 8 of the ‘keepers’ from that process over the past few years cleaned up and remixed by yours truly over the summer. Special thanks to Ed Tetreault on giving me some guidance on the mixing process and helping me salvage a couple mixes that I thought were beyond hope. Additional special thanks to Paolo Cantarella for providing his own musicianship in some of the breaks I chopped — especially on the track ‘Hope.’ Lastly, special thanks to Dan Finn for joining Paolo on track 8 "Everything is Real."

Most of this involved simply learning the program of Renoise, beginning with the track 'NL01' in the summer of 2022. A discerning listener may also intuit that each tune is an etude of sorts exploring some aspect of electronic music from classic breaks (amen, apache, soul pride) to classic bass sounds (950 test tone, 808, reese), synthesis architecture (wave sequencing, wavetable, fm; song structure), etc. The mixing process was its own learning experience. I hope you get as much enjoyment listening to these as I did making them. Looking forward to working on more in this vein (with more woodwinds) in the future.

Be seeing you,

https://progressiveoverload.bandcamp.com/album/selected-solo-works-22-23

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nPHtHVKFjDgkJP0TPrSynn5k3dk0w3ZKg&si=Xg3X0l34D2Df_ww0

https://open.spotify.com/album/2Dm0jU5MfIbthryPiJoavC?si=Z0QueQgXSEGkg3hNd2YMyA

https://music.apple.com/us/album/selected-solo-works-22-23/1765566095