Zenarchery

I’m currently downloading the first Violent Femmes record off Bittorrent. I’m downloading it (or at least, mentioning that I’m downloading it) because I’ve bought it at least once on cassette and twice on CD and it keeps disappearing. The same is true of The Cure’s Disintegration, which I’ve actually bought at least four times and downloaded at least twice.

Personally and professionally? I don’t feel even guilty about this. I’ve bought these albums — but over the years, my copies have vanished and been replaced and vanished again and I just want a copy for my iPod.

What’s your position on this? Is this even technically a violation of copyright?

Here’s a new instrumental track for your background listening pleasure, “Terminal Island”. It’s kind of me trying to do Trentemoller/Burial sort of ambient stuff. The melody lines are algorithmically generated and then looped.

It’s a nice little atmospheric piece, named after the island in Long Beach Harbor near where I used to live.

I have dozens of these little pieces on my hard drive, ideas for pop tracks that never went anywhere or just experimentations. Every so often, I just pull one out and shape it roughly into a song. I think of these pieces as sort of the musical equivalent of deleted scenes on a DVD, or b-sides. They’re fun to put together and they sound nice, but they’re not really full-fledged songs in their own right — more musical textures, like motifs from a soundtrack. At some point, I’ll probably put out a collection of them — my own Selected Ambient Works, I suppose.