turned into these versions:

Overall the album turned out quite ok :) I think it's mostly held back by sounding kinda muddy and quiet. Part of that is probably to blame on our inferior recording methods (using the fieldrecorder as an audiointerface I can only ever record one track at a time, so seperating drums and synths is basically impossible afterwards), but I think my lacking mixing and production knowledge is probably also holding back the sound of the album.

Probably the best songs on the album are the thicc sounding Wacław which has a vocal sample throughout that my friend Ben Africa sent me. My other favorite is Timeline 12 which Wujtah and I recorded in his van somewhere in France with just my Nintendo DS and the Korg game and his crazy multieffect pedal and a guitar amp.

For this album we also planned a little album release party. We rented out a really shoddy Techno club known for its afterhour parties bc it was super cheap because this was like during covid lockdown and all the clubs were officially closed except for private events. The party was pure chaos and probably the most stressed I've ever been in my life lol. We somehow quickly reached capacity since we were probably the hottest (and only) party in town. We set up our synths in front of the DJ booth and said that everyone could and play, but people were way too shy to actually come and do that. Also because of weird covid laws people werent allowed to bring their drinks to the dancefloor which made for a weird but funny atmosphere. Afterwards there were open deck DJ sets which went a lot better.

This was also around the time we started experimenting with physical media. We burnt Exercises in Ethanol on tape to give it out at the show. I wonder where those copies ended up actually. I have no clue. We also had the idea or ripping the tape audio again and using this as the master for the album on bandcamp, however this didn’t really result in my desired “lofi vibes” but just kinda muddied out the mix even more.

After this I made a compilation of (partly previously released) ambient jams called "Ambien Tape" (inspiring name ik...), as a sister album to the beats on Exercises and burnt it on CD. Each CD copy had a different photo I made as its cover to give each CD some unique personal flair.

We played another live gig at rrr in March 2022 shortly after as an opening for Chelle's bestie Mataya. We had a super cute live setup, because we thought "if the music is gonna suck, at least it'll be pretty to look at."

I think we did somewhat okay. But what I leared from this gig and another one as part of the SoundsQueer showcase, is that doing a completely improvised set is REALLY hard and stressful. Having to entertain people and keep them dancing is hard enough as a DJ, but when you're doing it live... wew. When I do another live gig, I'll definitely prepare some like drum patterns and melodies and presets beforehand.
What followed this were more jams, although with less participation by Cole (as he got more busy) and more partcipation by Wujtah, Chelle and Flo.

IdqllyI was recorded in Belgium when I visited Wujtah. He had this sick of organ with a big wheel inside that rotated and created a droning and tremolo effect (think it’s called "Leslie Speaker" ). I loved the sounds of it. The clear highlight is our avant garde masterpiece “kisstheflies”, which features me swatting flies in his dirty ass apartment and him playing the bass notes of the organ.

Adansonia cacatuidae was made in Chelle’s apartment by taping down some keys on their old ass organ and just kinda fucking around with some like percussion instruments I got at the world music store lol. one of them i used as the cover art (which im p proud of how nice it turned out tbh lol). we put a bunch of different recording devices in the room and then afterwards i mixed all the recorded files with different effects of ableton i also added some free bird sounds i found on freesounds.org to make it more of an interesting listen. there's a normal version and a version with a shittty ass bitrate- a lot of james ferraro's old lofi tapes has absolutely horrid bitrate and i think it actually for a cool effect, makes things sound kinda watery- Chelle prefered the normal version which is why the album upload features both recordings.

I’m gonna write a bit more about the final 2 SOTS projects Beneath Interwoven Lagoons Lies Year​-​long the Belligerent Ancient Sunken Salmon (->BILLY BASS) and shit jams, because they’re the last SOTS albums and, well, they’re the freshest on my mind. Also they have probably the most concept behind them tbh, are probably also the best ones and turned out to be a nice contrast to each other. I was going through all the leftover jam recordings we still had from the year and collected the best sounding parts. I ended up with a little collection of ambient songs and a lil collections of acid techno type bangers, so I decided to work on two seperate projects to round off the year 2022.

The Billy Bass album originally started with the song “submerge”. It was a really long and sounding ambient jam that reminded me of James Ferraro’s ambient stuff so I decided to lean until the lofi horrible bitrate thing again The recording had kind of an underwater feel to it so I put a whole lot of underwater recordings of aquariums and lakes on top of it. I liked the water theme so I thought it’d be cool if the whole album centered around different types of water field recordings. 13 Lakes was the last recording I I did with Cole. He came over to my place and we wanted to have one final jam before he moved back to the US. He told me about this movie called "13 Lakes" that’s just video recordings of the shores of different lakes. I thought it was cool that they actually showed it in cinemas and we had it playing in the background while we made the music Audio from the movie also plays during the song. Cave and Factory I just reused from the Ambien tape although I gave them a new mixdown and some additional water related field recordings underneath. The last song “Rain falls on Hoboken” is a reference to a Yo La Tengo track and for it I wanted to experiment with some William Basinski type sound degregation. I really like the concept of The Disintregration Loops , even though I’ve never actually heard that album. Anyway I didn’t have any tapes so I ended up reducing the bitrate, bit depth and sampling rate as the song goes on.

Shit Jams contains a bunch of like half finished banger type songs I had and forced myself to finish up. The EP is very heavy on the Korg Monolgue and its heavy basslines. Really cool synth fr. Anyway I had all these songs that I worked on for a while but were unfinished and I was quite unhappy with, so I decided to give myself a deadline (the end of the year) and just turn them into something as fast releasable as fast I could. “Redo” and “Cardcore” are probably the songs I put the most work in and also the ones I’m the least happy with still. Redo was actually a remix of a song of Mataya that we put a lot of work in and it was just kind of like polishing a turd for hours. In the end I cut out like half the layers and reduced the song length to like a third and put a ton of compression and distortion on it and then suddenly it was at least listenable lol. Nordic Bangers and Baldee feature vocals from a jam at Cole’s when Burja and friend Kjartan were visiting. Kjartan did a rly funny freestyle about his “bald, bald boyfriend”. It was too funny to not put under a song, and it also made the otherwise barebones instrumental way more engaging. I think it also captures the chaotic SOTS energy the best which is something I wanted for the last release. After some experimental I also figured out a nice combination of Ableton compression effects that really make the kick drums sound good in a bunch of these songs. It’s crazy how much better these tracks become like instantly when they just have a good banging groove…

But maybe the most important lesson from this making these two projects was how important it is to just cut down songs in length. Even when you’ve put a bunch of working into tweaking some sections you just gotta “kill your darlings” as they say… I think it’s way better for a song to end quickly and leave you wanting more than to get too boring over time. Billy album released on Christmas day while Shit Jams released on New Years Day exactly 2 months after the first album (Sylvester).. a nice and festive way to wrap up the project.

To sum up, SOTS has been a wild ride and a whole lotta fun I learned a lot of things about music, production, recording gear, etc and also made many new friends through jamming as well I feel proud to go on the bandcamp and look through all the things we published and each time I listen to old things, I cringe a little bit at how basic and boring some things are, but I also think that there’s some cool idea in each recording somewhere. While I think some of the crazy spontaneaity and IDGAF attitude we had at the beginning slowly faded as our standards in recording quality rose, the spirit is still there and I intend to keep the torch burning in further projects :) And who knows maybe SOTS will be back also for some cameos for when I visit Cole or he visits me.