Serious work on the next Ugress album has begun, tentative release this summer. The work is highly rewarding and reveals some exciting data.

I spent most of the time this week doing Ugress 4 preproduction. This consists of going through all my ideas, concepts, sketches, getting to know it all, and creating a worksheet of potential candidates. I check each track, enter it into a spreadsheet with extended information; how finished the track is, which project it suits, what needs to be done, potential collaborators if applicable, and if it should be considered for U4.

Simultaneously I research my ideas and inspiration for the album, cataloguing my ocean of notes, and continuously perform edits to tracks. Right now the album is a misty cloud of loosely connected themes in my head. Any progress at this point seems to be very subconscious and intuitive, just developing tracks with all the ideas and concepts lingering freely in my thoughts. There is nothing concrete demanding a certain direction, or excluding an experimental approach. This is very liberating after 6 months of intensely focused compositional work.

At the moment I have 92 tracks I consider usable, and a very vague idea of how I would like U4 to sound. There are 17 tracks completely finished, 18 tracks above 75% finished, and the rest somewhere between 50% and "conceptual sketch".

I catalogue each track, to see which project it naturally belongs with. This easily excludes many of the 92 tracks from an Ugress release. But it also reveals some fantastic observations:

To my absolute surprise, a sleeping and non-published project of mine that I plan on release in 2010 or later, suddenly turned out to have 20 tracks almost ready. I estimate there to be a month or two of work to wrap this project up for a release. Also, the next Nebular Spool album is further along than I expected. I might be able to put those out this year. On the other hand, Ninja 9000 didn't have as many candidates as I thought, unless I fall into an 8 bit frenzy the album release is further ahead than scheduled (2010).

Next week I intend to focus on the potential Ugress candidates, and dive deeper into album concept research. Hopefully by the end of next week I should have a clearer idea of what the album should be like, which tracks to include and what to do with them.