This album was originally a CD I made to distribute to friends and family when I first got into making my own (electronic) music. Everything here was recorded around 2011-2012 and is essentially the first music I made that wasn't guitar-driven or written for a band. I went over these tracks and tried to EQ them as best I could, but unfortunately the original project files and stems are lost to time.

These tracks show me experimenting with a lot of different stuff and were influenced heavily by me obtaining my first synth and first "real" DAW. The sounds on the album are overwhelmingly from the Alesis Micron, as well as stock Mixcraft 5 VSTs with an occasional appearance of the Casio SK-1.

The covers here are physically painful for me to listen to, but I couldn't bring myself to omit them because the instrumental portions of them have some occasionally interesting stuff going on.

Finally, the track "Movements in a Black City" was an entry into a competition put on by Musicworks magazine, which was a magazine I discovered while on a family road trip to Canada. I don't remember the details, but the competition was open to "electroacoustic" tracks with a maximum length around 10 minutes per entry. Since I was clueless, I thought naturally the best thing was to try to compose a big 10 minute track that was basically a combination of several smaller tracks (hence "movements"). My thinking was that this should make it as maximalist and un-subtle as possible, and in turn, it would somehow appear more impressive. Of course, this backfired and even if I had been more competent at production, it would have been rejected anyway. My primary influences at the time were Depeche Mode (primarily Black Celebration) and 80s movie soundtracks, so I modeled it directly after those.

The cover photo was taken in 2011 on my last day of high school.