There’s a fairly conspicuous issue that some of my listeners have asked themselves, which I’ve never really addressed explicitly, which might be best summed up as:
“What the HELL happened between Disruption Theory and Normalized?!”
All conceptual and philosophical connections aside, I’ll be the first person to acknowledge that those are two very-different sounding records. DT came out in November of 1999, back when every conversation I had with people seemed to make mention of the incredible potential of the Internet, and I was starting to hear some subtle rumblings about an obscure program called Napster that was already getting legal action from record labels. Normalized was released in September 2003, sounding and resembling the first CD very little at all, and causing a fair amount of confusion and controversy amongst my listeners.
I haven’t really gone into much detail about the period from early 2000 through to fall of 2003, or the events that took place that helped to shape the sound and direction of the second CD. But a very big part of why Normalized sounds so different to Disruption Theory has to do with this semi-obscure detail:
There was another album that I made, in 2001-2002, which would have been the followup to my first CD. I spent as much time and energy producing the record as I have on any project I’ve ever been involved in, even though I didn’t play a single note of guitar on it. It was done for an outside label, in collaboration with another artist, even though he didn’t have anything to do with making the record. It’s the most elaborately-produced, densely-textured, conceptually-loaded project I’ve ever had a hand in creating, and a huge part of the sound and style of Normalized, as well as my Echoplex work over the last several years, is a very direct reaction to the experience of making that album.
But these issues have never really been addressed. Because a few months after I turned in the finished album, the label shelved it. That was over three years ago.
Why do I bring this up now? Because that lost album is finally being released in a few weeks.
Much more soon…