So these are the first of three cdrs which I have "released" this year through the geocaching network.
The first is entitled "Endless Tower" and features music I made In the first few months after moving over here. It has probably the broadest range of sounds and styles I reckon, and a lot of it was inspired by my earliest explorations of the South Downs and the discoveries I made. I was also getting heavily stuck into the music equipment I had brought over with me as I had a good deal of spare time on my hands prior to getting a full time job. I picked up a very cheap sampler at this time too and spent a lot of time playing with that. I had no idea at this early stage that these tracks would end up as part of the geocaching project: they were more of an extension of the last lot of improvised music I was making before I left home. When I finished this disc I was approached by the Spirit of Gravity (spiritofgravity.com) in Brighton (whom I had contacted some time before about doing a show) and in June 2012 the first Zpg show alongside Timothy Didimus and Shitmat came to pass.
I tried a proto-geocaching experiment on that particular evening, hiding some CDs near Preston park in Brighton and handing out flyers at the show with the coordinates of the box on them. The gig was great fun but the weather was not conducive to hunting for a box of home recorded music for the guts of a week afterwards. (Also, I believe I got the coordinates wrong on the flyer which was pretty hopeless of me. )
After that I decided it might be best, seeing that I had invested in a geocaching-specific GPS device, to utilise the preexisting geocaching framework as a means of hiding the CDs. I placed a geocache with a few copies of 'Endless Tower' outside Lewes in East Sussex and marked it as a "music-exchange" cache, requesting that people take a cd and leave a cd of their own in return. Its still very much active but most visitors are of the "took nothing, left nothing" variety.
The second cdr in the series "Tar", was finished approx 2 months later and distributed through the summer in caches between Brighton and Eastbourne. Stylistically I think this one has something in common with doom metal (!) as it is quite slow and grinding throughout, but uses synths instead of guitars of course. I like this one quite a bit, the tracks are simple and heavy. I splashed out on a couple of MFB semi-modular synthesisers while making this as well and they added quite a bit of new sonic interestingness to the mix. The cover features scans of interesting bits of wood and stone which I came across while hiking as well as a beautiful leaf I found in a book dating from the late 19th Century. The leaf was as delicate as tissue paper and completely devoid of chlorophyll - just a network of leafy veins, suspended in a wispy frame. It had possibly been resident in the aforementioned tome for the past 100 years and had a limited chance of surviving the following few minutes so I took a high resolution scan and let the leaf finally go to its grave.
The most recent cd (as of early October ) is called "Boraces" and is so far the least distributed. Earlier this week on my day off I started caching them in earnest around the Plumpton area and got a few planted. (More details/photos on that days geocaching to come soon). Stylistically this is more "electronica" based (although still improvised).