Decomposure - Songs from Old Headphones

$0.00 Digital Download Only | MP3 | Out December 29, 2009 | Cat#: squeak-5

Share This or follow Decomposure on Twitter/Facebook/Myspace

Disc 1
First things first: the album is called 'Songs from Old Headphones' for a reason. Aside from the perfect cover photo i came across as i was sorting through boxes of old stuff (i swear i found it after i had already decided on the title, it's from 2001), this is music that is and always was meant for headphones. Before i was an all-caps-musician-exclamation-point, music was something i made for myself; i never truly expected anyone else to listen to it. A few years, a couple crashed hard drives and a lot of changes later, all that's left of those early experiments are a pile of decaying cdrs tucked away in a cd case and the mp3 versions i made for myself. So this album could very well have been called 'Songs for Old Headphones' - the songs represented here vary wildly in bitrate, EQ, compression and style, simply because no other versions exist, and many of them almost don't make sense coming out of a decent outloud system. And for years, headphones were basically the only way i listened to music, whether it was creating my own at home or listening to others during long bus rides. Or very long walks once i ran out of money for bus rides: i hatched a lot of great memories trekking from the UBC campus to Emily Carr, staring off into middlespace and attaching music to landmarks as i walked. But enough about that...

Disc 1 represents an era i'd term 'Pre-Decomposure' off the top of my head. That's not technically correct, as much of this music overlaps with the creation of 'Taking Things Apart' and 'At Home and Unaffected.' But taking Decomposure on as a name was more about a stylistic shift toward a specific focus on a narrow strain of experimental formalism, especially at first, while this disc has its roots in the rave-y, bigbeat sampledelica i found and adored in high school. Decomposure eventually won out over Pre-Decomposure, and so for years i was a little embarrassed about these old tunes, like they were drawn by a caveman and unworthy of release (and more to the point, because of sampling issues, ineligible for release anyway). 'So why release them at all?' asks the omnipresent foil of my notes. Well, as this decade fades out, i suppose i've been retracing my steps, maybe feeling like i've painted myself into a corner in a few rooms of my life, trying to figure out where i'm going next by looking at where i've come from. To be clear: this isn't a legacy-building thing the way these collections can be sometimes. i'm not releasing this because i think legendary people like me deserve it, but rather because i can, and i feel like i need to.

But more about that later. This disc collects my favourites of the Pre-Decomposure era, the tracks i have the least reservations about. For every track included here, there's three or four other tracks that suffer from varying degrees of awful that didn't make it for a variety of reasons (boring, sample-loop heavy, incomplete, just plain bad, etc.). Many were made to play really loud in the imaginary late-90s danceclub in my head, and they wear their influences on their sleeves, but still, i 'get' them the way they were meant to be heard. Recently, on a long trip, i played an album i loved during my teens for my wife. And she heard it coming out of the speakers at the same time as me, but it just wasn't... hers. It was mine, and it still moved me years later because i could still hear it blowing my mind as a fifteen-year-old kid. That's the hurdle i never seem to clear with my music in general - making people hear it the way i do. So hopefully you do, just a little, or this is going to be one terrible slog...

Disc 2
i've never thought of myself as especially prolific; it seems like i just never have enough time to start on all the things i have planned. But, over the years, you can't help but collect a trail of odds-and-ends that don't really belong to anything, and it adds up after a while. So disc 2 is more or less a firmly 'Decomposurey' set of detritus, with a few pertinent early works, instrumentals, demos and remixes thrown in there for good measure. (There are no instrumentals or beats-only tracks from Vertical Lines A because they were already released on the supplemental DVD VLA shipped with.)

Again, the line between disc 1 and disc 2 is blurry, and a few tracks (Saskatchewan, Radio Edit, The Colossus, etc.) could go either way, but i would say there's an underlying difference in focus between the discs that i think you can hear. i think the shift really happens somewhere in mid-2003, as i leave college, snuggle into married life and get signed to Unschooled Records after Howard Hecht hears a demo of Matches i posted for review on godsofmusic.com. After that point, Pre-Decomposure begins waning down to nothing, and the music gets a little more serious and experimental, perhaps too much so at times. And though the sound quality is often better, this disc is still very headphone-y, as many tracks have never touched a real engineer's ear.

There's some tracks here that only a few people have heard, and a few more that just plain got lost in the yearly waterfall of indie releases, so it's a tremendous relief to finally let them out. i used to be so motivated by the fame and giant piles of money i imagined experimental music raked in, but these days i'm just happy when people hear it, even if i forget to respond to their emails (sorry!).

caleb, December 2009

1.		Live Forever		[4:59]
2.		Flipyo		[4:05]
3.		Casting Shadows		[8:53]
4.		Moonlight		[5:49]
5.		Intergalactic Remix		[4:11]
6.		Sunshower		[5:36]
7.		My Life's Like a Soundtrack		[4:45]
8.		Leaving on a Jet Plane Remix		[5:18]
9.		The Colossus		[5:09]
10.		Snowfall		[3:35]
11.		Universe		[6:22]
12.		Living in Color		[4:43]
13.		Wither		[7:14]
14.		Numnickles		[4:47]
15.		Overprotected		[3:29]
16.		Saskatchewan		[4:45]
17.		Cosmical Triggers Remix		[3:07]
18.		Little Drummer Boy		[4:06]
19.		Dreidel		[2:56]
20.		...Shrugged		[3:17]
21.		Someday		[3:37]
22.		Misfit Out of Time Remix		[5:08]
23.		Radio Edit		[5:17]
24.		Whose Side Are You On? (Instrumental)		[5:04]
25.		Distraction (Instrumental)		[3:22]
26.		Multitracked (Instrumental)		[4:40]
27.		Mr. Lonely Remix		[3:55]