A Shameless Plug for My New Beat Tape!

More beats!

The past few years, I've gotten back into beatmaking, a hobby I indulged in heavily from about 2004-2015. When I got an iMac in '04, it came with Garageband and I discovered that I essentially now had a built-in sampler and at least a rudimentary recording studio, and I went bananas. 

Somewhere amid this process, I started getting the urge to actually release some beats as a record, and quickly ran up against the terrifying specter of sample clearance. I had no interest in that, despite most of my favorite beats coming complete with at least one sample, if not more.

Looking back, that's probably good, because it forced me to get more creative.

In recent years, I started revisiting those tracks, eliminating the samples and rebuilding with the remaining parts, which also gave me a chance to play the Les Paul Studio ("L.P.S.") electric guitar that I essentially cast aside in 2016 when Charlie Hustle & the Grifters morphed into the Sweaty Already String Band. It's so much fun to play, and I discovered I had a whole new control over it with 6-8 years of additional guitar playing under my belt.

In parallel with this, I was also sampling live recordings of The Wolf Tones to create a separate series of original "bluegrass beats." Throughout, I started thinking more about how to create a consistent sonic atmosphere and especially about some of the post-recording/polishing/mastering things that I really hadn't gotten into in the early days. 

Vol. 1 of L.P.S. Breaks was called Saturday Breakfast Buffet, a reference to the overall sound palette and how it reminded me of going to the neighborhood breakfast spot on a weekend morning. This new volume is called Electrosonique, which is in fact a fake French-sounding word that does not mean anything. But I do think it somehow fits the outer-spacey vibe of this collection. 

It will be available on all major streaming services in the near future, but you can listen and buy a copy now at Bandcamp.com.