Private Releases

So I mentioned in my last blog that I was toying with the idea of doing a Private Releases project, a la Conrad Schnitzler, but I couldn't at the time work out how to do it. In an ideal world the releases would be physical, on CDR, but not owning a printer good enough to do the covers (and not being able to afford one either) that idea was out. For now at least.

Eventually after thinking through a few ideas and trying some of them I settled for creating a new Bandcamp page under the name Private Releases and making it subscription only so least the spirit of the enterprise was still there.

There were several points to this exercise.

The first was after discovering Conrad Schnitzler's private collection list on the internet and contacting him directly, which was the only way to get hold of these releases, I became intrigued with the idea of having a secret stash of recordings that very few people knew about. As the years went by this idea continued to gnaw away at me until a week or so back I decided to finally get my finger out and do something about it.

Another point of the exercise is that many of the albums which will appear in the series will be stripped back often using only one or two instruments at most. The idea being that the subscriber can, if they want to, remix pieces from the different albums to create new works or use the pieces in conjunction with their own works (as long as they credit me for my stuff which is only fair I think).

That said. some albums will feature music that hasn't been released before or were part of a side-project which disappeared without a trace so no-one knows them. There will also be albums featuring just field recordings from various locations. The releases will not be genre-specific, just as my main releases aren't restricted to a particular style.

Another thing about the Private Releases which are different from my main releases is there are no album or track titles - just a numbering system. I wanted the music to be anonymous and not having titles influencing the thought processes of those, if any, who buy the albums. Saying that the albums do have a small description on the cover such as "electronic", "voice" or "piano" just to give the subscriber a rough idea of what is on each album.

So far I have outlined 22 albums:

001 - piano & electronics 002 - electronics

003 - static 004 - nature

005 - electronics 006 - voice

007 - one piece 008 - atmospheres

009 - electronics 010 - field recordings

011 - piano 012 - strings

013 - voice & electronics 014 - retro

015 - electronics 016 - dark ambient

017 - strings 018 - urban

019 - wonky 020 - voice & piano

021 - electronics 022 - strings

I have releases the first five albums and 007 is complete and 008 has 4 tracks done. 006 is the next to be done.

I have a page here showing the releases so far. This Bandcamp page is here.