Tag Archives: Music

6Threads – Coming Soon!

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Having just completed the master for the upcoming An Early Morning Letter, Displaced release; 6Threads, I’d like to make a formal announcement here along with some words about this collection of work.


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 Rounding out the album is one of the earliest recordings from An Early Morning Letter, Displaced – “If Only”, an unpublished piece from 1999.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.

Articles of Note! August 2010

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I’d like to take some time as this month comes to a close to highlight some articles and posts that have featured my personal involvement with ‘An Early Morning Letter, Displaced‘, Emergent Collective One, or both:


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:

‘PHP’ – Lee Fernandes Interview on Pique Web

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Lee Fernandes, contributor of the track ‘PHP’ on Emergent Collective One was recently interviewed by Pique Web. Check it out around the one hour mark to hear Lee discuss PHP (the language), EC1, references within the lyrics, and the audio composition process!

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

“Emergent Collective One” – Now Available

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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!

On the Importance of Free-flow Expression

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A few weeks ago, I was being interviewed about my audio project “An Early Morning Letter, Displaced” and some questions came up around process. Specifically whether the process of creating had changed much for me over the last decade in regard to music composition. I’ve thought about this quite a bit since the interview and decided to make an attempt at emulating that old free-flow creative style I started with.

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