Hi again.
I’m thrilled to announce the release of my latest album of music, Landscapes for New Mexico. It is the my most coherent musical output in 6 years of wobbling through weird side projects, so it feels like a significant achievement and worthy to share with you. Feel free to pull it up and listen (for free) while I tell you a few behind-the-scenes details about it.
Eh... What is it?
The idea was to compose an album of landscapes, music as landscape, sounds that reciprocate with landscapes, sonic portraits of places, of this place in particular. I could delve into convoluted complexities here, but for sake of conversation, I wanted to think about the sound image blurring between portraiture and landscape (typical tropes of painting) and craft the mannerism of the music making to slip and slide between literal interpretation and illustrative representation of the living and formal inhabitants within these frames. I hope that makes some kind of sense to you. For myself, this has been a delicate practice of sense-making in relation to a disembodied presence, somehow outside the window and inside my ears, emptying and filling, austere, bucolic, pastoral, reverberant. I think of it as a kind of self-portraiture without a person in the frame, all background and shadow.
While assembling the collages for the track art, I ended up making too many. So I minted those separately. Yeah... all this stuff is minted as NFTs. The music is on Ethereum mainnet, the visual art is on Optimism using a tool called Zora... I've been experimenting with this tech recently and think it's pretty fucking cool, at least potentially. Maybe we can delve deeper into this point. But first, let's talk more about landscapes, please.
This Isn’t the First Album for Landscapes
Circa 2013, while stumbling around Scandinavia, I composed an album of (what I felt to be) quite epic proportions. This album is titled Ö, which is the Swedish word for island and also a humorously anthropomorphic glyph that looks like a person with their eyes outside of their head, or a mouth agape in sublime terror. I felt compelled to use electric strings and distorted percussion to paint an aural image of my experiences in that place, but that’s a different story that I'm already actively forgetting.
Significantly, one song was partially written that did not make it on to that album. It has been haunting me, an audio hallucination, a ghastly meme, morbid riff specter, disembodied phantom. When I rooted in the Southwest, I was able to bury these remains and re-member them into a new form infused with the dusty wind currents of this land. This morsel has matured into the Wind Song on the new album, and inspired a world to emerge in its wake.
What, Exactly, Am I Listening to?
After 4 years of pacing and ruminating, I concretized this whole thing in just under 3 months. The recording, mixing, and mastering took place in the earthship, watched over by towhees, juncos, and a curious porcupine. (This is the first push towards an ambition for more accelerated music production.) All the songs were composed on acoustic guitar, living room drums, unaffected bass, sleigh bells, tambourine, and a really fucking nice triangle that I purchased specifically for the solo on the sixth track, Pastoral Portraiture. The flute, clarinet, cello, organ, choir, french horn, and other supporting instruments were recorded with a Mellotron. I picked up a harmonium in Berkeley, CA, during my summertime travels and completely fell in love with this instrument, filling an important negative space on Wind Song and High Altitude Walking Song. My original intention was to saturate the tracks with field recordings of this area, but I ultimately decided to omit this step and let the music retain some of it’s vulnerability. I made all the collages that accompany the album from found vintage texts about New Mexico.
So… Where Can I Buy it?
As I mentioned above, I am experimenting with emerging web3 tech to publish these works. For music, I'm using a platform called Catalog. The album has been minted as a 1/1 NFT on Ethereum mainnet. IMHO, Catalog has a pretty cool way of thinking about music distribution and valuation that caters to both bin digging collectors and low key supporters. The idea is this:
A collector can purchase a track through an auction and receive the 1/1 NFT. They know that this is a truly singular artifact, since the artist is committed to not pressing any additional NFTs. The collector can choose to resell the NFT on a marketplace, at which point the artist receives 10% royalties of any future sales. Pretty familiar territory for those of us that have been peddling digital prints and albums for years...
Casual supporters can “Cosign” a track. This unique feature is a layer 2 transaction (on Base chain, which is super cheap). For the cost of about $2, the cosigner adds their name to the track to validate and support a work they believe in. They also are able to download the lossless wav file and receive access to special communication channels in the Catalog community. This is kinda equivalent to "liking" a track, but the signal is more concrete and provides some additional layer of access. To participate in this process you will need to setup a crypto wallet, onramp some funds from fiat to ETH, and get them on Base chain. You can do this pretty easily using Coinbase, although if you are an artist that is curious about using these tools for your own work I would love to share some self-custodial ways of going about this. Feel free to reach out.
The community is also actively attracting curators to compose playlists for Catalog.Radio. Curators have scheduled time slots to share/perform their unique taste, inspiring cultural dialogue between artist <> collector <> curator <> passive listener. On this front, I think there is a lot of potential and I'm hoping these experiments in discovery, sharing, and community building gain more traction in the future.
I know this letter will land in the inbox of many people that might not be familiar with web3, crypto, the woes of the web2/extractive music industry, and related topics. If you are familiar - or maybe even a power user - I would love to hear your take on this release strategy so that I can continue to iterate and improve to your liking on future releases.
Final Thoughts
Another aspect of this release is this letter you are reading, my dedication to publishing transmedia content more regularly, and trying to share my experiments in a more conversational manner.
In the coming weeks I will be experimenting with releasing work-in-progress sounds using another platform called Zora. You can listen to these samples for free and choose to collect them (only costs gas fees, about $.70 per mint). Here's my first experiment, the beginning of a musical dialogue that might lead to a new Perpeteia album.
I recently started a Hypersubs account. This is kinda like web3 Patreon, but less cringy. I'm really impressed with their design and UX. Subscribing on Hypersubs is probably the single most impactful way to show support, as it will directly contribute to releasing new music, new art, more updates, and eventually funnel into the artist residency program I'm setting up out here in the desert. (A future post will share more details about the residency.) I feel really deeply utterly embarrassed about this kind of shameful self-promotion - still coming to grips with how to live as an anti-capitalist in this surreal world marketplace - but I believe in the vision of this platform and others like it sprouting up in web3.
I will be posting updates on Warpcast, a new social media platform that purports to be sufficiently decentralized and highly accommodating to new cultural commentary. You can use this link to signup up for a Warpcast/Farcaster account, if you feel so inclined. I started a channel specifically to share new work across all my different output streams. Find it here.
Thank you for reading, thank you for listening, thank you for cosigning, thank you for subscribing, thank you for your attention and resilience, thank you for your feedback.
Best wishes,
TW
