I had never heard of February Album Writing Month [FAWM] before this year but it seems to have actually been around for quite some time. The idea behind it is that you commit to writing 14 songs in 28 days. Since 2012 is a leap year, it’s going to be 14 1/2 songs over 29 days this time around. So basically 15 songs over the entire month.

The approach I’m taking is one of experimentalism and fun. With all of the ‘serious’ [contractual] work I’m doing on other projects, I have felt a strong desire to just goof around and create something. FAWM provides this opportunity to me.

I want to make it very clear that none of these recordings are “An Early Morning Letter, Displaced” material. I may pull ideas from these tracks for future work – but as of now this all stands on its own as simple, raw, sonic experimentalism…

Visit my FAWM page and listen to recordings at http://fawm.org/fawmers/josephlabrecque/.

Also of note; the image I’m using to represent this body of work was created with Photoshop Touch on my Transformer Prime tablet. I’m having a bit of fun with PS Touch and thought this rough sketch would work perfectly along with the raw tracks being recorded.

I’ve been wondering for some time whether Google would be opening some way for artists and labels to distribute music through the Android Market. There have been rumors for some time and as a user of Google Music Beta, I’ve enjoyed other music-based offerings provided by the company. When I initially saw that Google had now opened up an artist portal, I was intrigued but didn’t actually check it out right away simply because I wasn’t sure I wanted to dedicate the time in setting up yet another outlet for my studio recording project, “An Early Morning Letter, Displaced“.

Google Music artist search...

Once I did get around to checking out their service though, I was met with a number of pleasant surprises. The first being that Google already was aware of my project and had even prepared a sort of stub artist page for it. When an artist or label enters the artist hub to add an artist, they will first be provided with a search mechanism as seen above.

Uh... awesome! :D

The biggest surprise came when I actually claimed the page and set up a payment plan through Google Checkout. As seen in the screenshot above, Google actually waived the $25 setup fee! It says that they are doing this since they already had a page set up for me- so mileage on this one may vary. I can image though, a lot of artists are much more well known than my little project so if you are interested… go claim your page right away as they most likely will not be offering this waiver forever. Who knows. Kudos to Google either way.

Setup of the actual artist page is very straightforward. You supply an image, bio, links… standard fare. Setting up albums is a really nice experience though. You must create a new album, which is populated with a title, price, release data, type of release, and high quality album artwork. You’ll next need access to your CD-ready files from mastering, so hopefully you have those handy :) They obviously take some time to upload, after which you can then provide track meta-data along with individual prices. You can also allow certain tracks to provide limited free listens, if desired. Once finished, you hit publish and it generally took, in my case, a few hours for Google to approve the album.

Android Market: An Early Morning Letter, Displaced

At this point, you can have a full artist page and albums for sale on Android Market. Pretty cool, no?

One side note: this is not yet available in all countries… so many non-US artists will feel miffed, initially. I do hope Google is able to expand these services beyond the United States very soon!

The recording is intentionally “quiet” and bass-heavy. If listening on a system which produces inadequate lows- you won’t be able to experience the half of it!

Silent Night by Fractured Vision Media

I’ve also loaded up a bunch of Fractured Vision Media distributed tracks to Soundcloud:
Latest tracks by Fractured Vision Media

Track listing:

1. To Lead You Down
2. Strangling Strangers
3. Atrophy
4. (still) So Crushed
5. Alice
6. If Only

6Threads is the first EP release from An Early Morning Letter, Displaced since 2002. I remember when I completed the August EP in 2000, how relieved I was that it was over and could not imagine the work it would take to complete a full length album. Over a decade later, we have two LP releases and will soon have three EPs along with involvement in a number of compilations, remixes, and covers.

A short-play disc allows a bit of a breather in between full collections. I didn’t want to go 2 to 3 years (again) until a new album after Shudderflowers, but still needed to have a time for recollection and the formation of new ideas. This compact format allows me both.

6Threads runs a little over half an hour and contains a balanced sampling of work that spans the history of An Early Morning Letter, Displaced from our beginnings in 1999 to the present day:

Spanning over a decade of work within the space of a six track EP; 6Threads includes three entirely new recordings which continue to showcase An Early Morning Letter, Displaced as a luminary of powerful, impassioned music. Alongside these new tracks are alternate versions of “So Crushed” from A Prison of Oneself and the original (long) version of “Alice” from Shudderflowers. Rounding out the album is one of the earliest recordings from An Early Morning Letter, Displaced – “If Only”, an unpublished piece from 1999.

The version of “So Crushed” on this release is a remastered version of the original recording with an alternate sound bed and new vocals. “Alice” is the original, longer version with extended ambient and incidental sequences. “Strangling Strangers” was (in it’s original form) part of the Strangling Strangers project before it was dissolved and a nearly identical version is included on the community compilation, Emergent Collective One. “To Lead You Down” is the opening track and embodies the spirit of this collection, while “Atrophy” is a return to to style closer to the recordings on A Prison of Oneself and even Through Darkened Eyes.

This is a digital-only release – I’m afraid the physical compact disc is all but dead.

Joseph Labrecque
August 20th – CodeBass.net

360Flex – An awesome night of nerd made music!! 360Flexapalooza!
August 18th – 360|Flex

DU programmer moonlights as electronic musician
July 16th – DU Today

Also, it’s been almost a month since Emergent Collective One was released. Here are some posts about the collection:

• Emergent Collective One Community CD Released
• “Emergent Collective One” – All the Little Pieces…
• EMERGENT COLLECTIVE released, the community rejoices!
• Emergent Collective One
• Emergent Collective One
• PHP The Anthem
• Pique Web Episode 3 – Sessions, accounts, and the PHP Anthem
• Cyberpunks Released
• PHP Anthem
• PHP song by Emergent Collective One, and it ROCKS!
• and many, many more… just Google it!

Listen to the interview:
Pique Web Episode 3 – Sessions, accounts, and the PHP Anthem

Emergent Collective One

Formally known as the “community compilation CD project”, Emergent Collective One is now available for download. As detailed in the original call for submissions, this is a community effort and is quite free for those who wish to acquire a copy. Released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license; you may download, distribute, and make as many copies of these materials as you like, so long as you perform no modifications and retain attribution to the artists involved.

A few extra notes…

• Something you’ll notice immediately when visiting the website, is that you can view the entire booklet online as an interactive SWF. I did all the layout for the PDF version of the booklet using Adobe InDesign CS5 and it was quite simple to perform an additional export to Flash like this. Pull or click the upper corners to flip through the booklet.
• I recommend burning a copy of the release to CDR. If you’ve never had to burn a CDDA disc image before, they are distributed as a set of files (primarily BIN/CUE) which retains all track data, CD-TEXT, ISRC codes and so forth. Lots of applications can be used to burn this to CDR. I recommend ImgBurn for Windows users.
• You can download a collection of 320kbps MP3 files as well as the CDDA image.  The MP3 files heard through the web player are only 128kbps…
• The iWebTunes web player is based on the Open Source Media Framework and was authored by Lee Fernandes (also a contributor).
• Printable CD cover and tray inlay artwork is included in each download as high resolution TIF.
• The cover image is adapted from a piece of scrap-art assembled by my wife, Leslie who is also involved in the wide community of Joomla!/PHP.
• The generative thread art contained in the booklet was created using the HYPE Framework which is just so much fun to play with.
• I cannot thank our contributors enough.  Without your submissions we would have nothing.  Now that we have a finished collection on hand, I really cannot see how any one of these tracks could *not* be included. Awesome work, all around. I am thrilled with what has emerged!

Lastly, thanks to everyone who supported this effort – please continue to spread the word and support your fellow community members!

For some background, when I originally began writing “music” back in 1999, I did so in a very matter of fact and destructive manner in that I simply recorded whatever came to mind and performed a lot of additive overlay edits to the sound bed until it was what I wanted. The entire first album “August” was composed in this way. Since then, I’ve been using multi-track sequencers and a full production software suite to compose, record, and produce my music. It’s a more intellectual approach- generally a smarter approach- and certainly a less destructive method of working. However, you do lose quite a  lot of spontaneity and flow in regard to the creative process. Almost as though your mind gets in the way of the emergent expressive flow coming out of you.

The video embedded below is a short film called “Furnace”. Both the video and audio portions of the work were conceived, recorded, and produced with this free-flow method in mind. What has emerged is something rather dreamlike in its structure – but not lacking in essential elements, for all that it is.

A statement in free-flow expression: Furnace.

Equipment used:

• Adobe After Effects CS5
• Adobe Premier Pro CS5
• Adobe Soundbooth CS5
• Cakewalk Sonar Producer 8.5
• Native Instruments Kontakt 4
• Alesis QS7
• M-Audio Audiophile 2496
• Behringer EURORACK MX 602A Mixer
• Behringer XM2000S Cardoid Microphone
• Flip UltraHD
• Windows 7
• Dell XPS420

Just so you all know- I’m holding myself to the deadline as well and my submission (above) just needs a few final tweaks before July 1st has come and gone…

I never expected anyone to go out of their way and create new material for the compilation and have been floored at the amount of work others are putting into their submissions. The community is truly awesome – the expression of this fact is really the point of the entire project. I thank all of you who have submitted material. Thank you.

After July 1st, I’ll go about arranging the tracks and doing what I can to create a cohesive compilation release. A final track listing will be published as soon as I determine how things should be arranged and I may be contacting individual contributors for more information, images, or anything else that is needed in the weeks ahead.

So what about the booklet and cover art? I’ve been in talks with someone from the Joomla! community who will be collaborating with me on the cover art. The booklet will be designed by myself and made available along with the final disk images.

Thank you again. Amazing response!