A Hardware Disaster & A New Relationship To Demos

Every time I move to a different city I spend at least a month getting owned. When I moved to Brooklyn in 2017 I lost my credit card, debit card, and passport over the span of about three weeks. I thought of it as taking my lumps for daring to think I could hack it in Da Big Apple, baby. The universe has subjected me to a similar hazing since moving back to Chicago. After being forcefully ejected (by accident!!) one too many times, my trusty external hard drive has decided to stop speaking to my laptop, leaving a large number of unfinished Lamniformes demos, Drumming Upstream covers in progress, and half-edited podcast episodes inaccessible for the foreseeable future. Luckily I have back ups for most of the irretrivables. The Drumming Upstream templates are easy to restore, and all of the most important Lamniformes tunes have duplicates on other hard drives and in the cloud. What hurts the most are the podcasts. I had one unedited episode of The Human Instrumentality Podcast that I recorded with Joseph Schafer over the summer and an entire season’s worth of unedited conversations about the creation of The Lonely Atom sitting on that hard drive. My summer being as complicated as it was, these projects slide all the way off the end of the back burner and into the coals.

There’s still a chance that I can retrieve the lost files. The helpful folks at Micro Center confirmed that the hard drive isn’t cooked, just temperamental and uncooperative. I’m not going to give up on the chance of friendly relations with this piece of equipment in the future. However, the current impasse has forced me to reckon with my digital mortality. As I ate my feelings at the Chipotle across the street from the Micro Center I realized that if I don’t share the stuff that I work on it might vanish forever. If you’re the only person that knows how a song sounds it can’t be said to exist in any way that matters. Sitting in that aluminum chair with rice and beans quickly filling my stomach, I resolved to keep a looser grip on my music going forward. From now on I’m going to open up the vaults every chance I get.

Here’s what that means for you: every month or so I’m going to upload the demos that I’ve written since the last upload. I guess that clock starts now, because below the pay-wall you’ll find the back-ups for the most important songs that I lost (?) when my hard drive started giving me the cold shoulder. These seven songs are the earliest stages of what I hope will become the next Lamniformes full length. Not all of the songs I’ve written for the album were in the back-up folder that I recovered these songs from, so over the next few weeks I’m goingto rewrite them from memory. In a cruel twist, memory and the act of recollection is exactly what the next Lamniformes album is about.

If you’d like to join on this trip down memory’s unpaved lane, I invite you to become a paying subscriber for either $5 a month or $40 a year. The more people that sign up, the stronger the incentive for me to write music. That’s a win-win for everyone!