You Can't Do This Alone
Announcing my new remix album and a link to the first single
I am proud to announce that my newest album is now available for pre-order. It’s called You Can’t Do This Alone and it is a remix album for my last album Sisyphean. The album art that you see above you is the work of Joseph Klomes, who you may remember from this week’s episode Lamniformes Radio as well as his work on the original Sisyphean cover. The promo pictures for the record, one which you will find below, were shot by Richard Gin. But with all due respect to my visual collaborators the really story is are the remixers.
The story goes like this: a year ago (almost exactly a year ago today, eerie) the live music industry stopped dead in its tracks. Any gigs that me or my friends had on the horizon vanished in a puff of smoke, along with many of the day jobs that supported musicians in between gigs. I was lucky enough to still be employed, so I decided to put together a project that would allow me to pay my friends and keep them busy. This remix album would also allow me to put the Sisyphean material to rest, since giving it a send off live was now impossible.
Of course, my motivations weren’t entirely altruistic. As readers may already know, I’ve long been interested in remix albums as a concept. Maybe it’s just because I have formative musical memories set to Linkin Park’s Reamination, but I think there’s something very magical about a remix album. A song exists one way, and then through the process of collaboration it is transformed into something entirely new. Through that process of reinterpretation you can hear what the remixer finds interesting in the original and how they filter those elements through their own style. I wrote about this all much more extensively back in August, which I can now reveal is while I was working on arranging You Can’t Do This Alone.
But back to the remix team for this record. Many of them will be familiar to you if you’ve kept up with Lamniformes Radio. Saint Thrillah transformed “Hypothermia” into a window rattling trap banger, while Frank Meadows turned the same song inside out to create a sonic collage out of its composite parts. Adam Holmes applied his algorithmic compositional approach to “Diminisher”, which produced an eerie and unresolved ambient track out of what was once the heaviest song on the record. Zain Alam of Humeysha detonated “Measured In Rings” like a confetti cannon, scattering its melodies into a mosaic of psychedelic sound. And Fabio Brienza of the Chicago doom metal band Varaha bent “Have A Nice Life” into a menacing trip-hop track.
All of these, and two of my own remixes, will available to hear come April 9th, but to tide you over until then you can hear Andrew Napier aka Noumenah’s remix of “Deep Despair in Covington, KY” by clicking over to Cvlt Nation, who are incidentally celebrating their 10th anniversary. I wrote a whole other thing about the track for Cvlt Nation, which you can read along with some very sweet and thoughtful words from writer Meghen MacRae, so I won’t say much more about it here except that Andrew knocked this thing out of the park.
I’ll continue to send letters about You Can’t Do This Alone until it comes or until enough people pay for my silence. This album was a blast to put together during a year where it wasn’t much of a blast to do anything. So thank you to all of my collaborators and all those listening. As promised, a hot pic of me by Richard Gin to close us out:
