A few notes on the Ruins release.

Nebular Spool - Ruins was written very much in February this year, with some additional work in March. It was a deliberating experience after all the stressed out fuzz and buzz around the Ugress - Unicorn release. Unicorn was the first "big" album I released on my own label, by myself, and there was a lot to learn and deal with. It was incredible fun but also a lot of work, for six months I didn't write or work with any new material.

When the Unicorn album was out, I was kinda fatigued from trying to fit into and relate to the hyper-commercialized music business, and bursting with unspent creativity to write new stuff.

Aside from a little tour to the US and a remix, I hid myself in the studio and just cranked out music with no regards to what I was doing or why. I didn't try for anything in particular, I just let the songs find their own flow, not worrying about radio friendliness or marketability.

Technically everything was done in with Logic 8 and Live 7, using a lot of Kontakt 3 and Reaktor 5 for sample manipulation. I also did some minor stuff and edits with Renoise, my favorite tracker. I really fell in love with Speakerphone, a superb impulse speaker emulator plugin for making lofi sounds. I ran sounds thru cellphones and airplane cockpits and guitar amps and then round again and further thru a bunch of old radios... great fun.

For the source sample material I did a lot of "blind" sampling, that is, I just grab the first random vinyl album I come across, and sample whatever I think can be twisted into something that works. For example, the distant, silvery choir-ish sound in Frozen Reflection is from a christmas carols album (with lots of horribly happy christmas songs). I put the album on, skip the needle around, grab a tone and out of the blue figure to used it for some high-frequent Reaktor granular mess-ups. If it works, keep it, continue with next. If it doesn't work, find a way to make it work, continue with next.

With so much material written over a short period with a focused mindset I felt the material was coherent enough to warrant it's own release, and it suited the Nebular Spool themathics.

I had come across the images of Lori Nix some months earlier and really fell in love with them, they were perfect for a Nebular cover. I contacted her and she was super cool, we quickly made a deal for licensing the images for cover artwork and website.

I was planning to release the album in mid-April, but I was very short on economical resources. In addition, my studio building was going down, I had to move out. Clearing out the studio and preparing for a nomadic lifestyle took a lot of time and energy. April was just a mess of applications, practicalities, bills and what-ifs. No time to finalize the album, or anything else. I pushed it to May.

Then May and June suddenly became very busy with travelling, touring, production and scoring gigs, which was sorely needed to fix the economics. Finally in July, when everyone left for vacations and the world sloved down, I had a week to put it all together and get it out.

Next week is back to chaos with the NRK space show, another production gig and live show at Lost Weekend.

The album is available for free download, and high quality purchase. It will be available in iTunes, Amazon etc in a couple of weeks (they are slow to update).