2012 recap

Well, I guess it’s a good time to look back on the last year. Not going to go into too much detail, it’s all in the blog somewhere or other from when these things were fresh…

Kicked off the year with a stint on CiTR Radio’s annual 24 Hours of Radio Art, airing some symphonic stuff and some cut-up spoken word and noise.

The end of January saw a quickie set at Tuesday Night Music Club, had some technical glitches and I was doing a more noise-based set compared to prettier sounding acoustic stuff.

Since I had issues with my video footage of that set, I did a quick and dirty jam version of one of the songs I performed, “Mister Hyde,” and posted that on YouTube a few days later.

I was approached by Drowning Susan to do a remix for them for The Long Count (“Filth [maQLu Edit]”) and I also did a couple remix contests – one for my pal c0ndu1t (“Forever and a Day [maQLu Mix]”) and I did a remix for Adaline’s “The Noise” contest too, looking forward to when that remix EP comes out in the spring of 2013 but I never heard anything back so I presume my remix wasn’t picked. Oh well.

If memory serves, the next big thing was doing Live From Thunderbird Radio Hell on CiTR Radio at the end of March, and then doing a set at VanMusic Presents’ Indie Pop Series a few days later at the start of April.

At the end of April I put out Futureghosts, which then did some time on the Canadian college radio charts, so… pretty decently received.

Throughout the summer I was working on demos for new songs, which soon grouped themselves organically into three streams. One became Malfeasance, which will be released on February 1, 2013, another is an album tentatively titled Rising which might not be out until 2014 at this rate due to some production stuff I want to do with it that isn’t quite coming together yet, and the third is another album only partly written which I hope to have out in late 2013. So, not much bubbling up to the surface in much of the second half of 2012, but I was indeed busy on stuff for next year.

In the early fall I did a cover of Depeche Mode’s “Lie To Me” for COMA Music Magazine‘s Tainted Candy: A Tribute to 80s New Wave, which came out at Hallowe’en.

Also shortly after Hallowe’en, I had finished Malfeasance and shipped it out to Scott Fox from iVardensphere for mastering. Funnily enough considering that at the end of working on Malfeasance I’d been feeling a little burned out, I seemed to get a burst of energy in late October and throughout November and put that to work on a series of five album-length noise/experimental/semi-improvisational whatever pieces: blood+birth, Avenger, Suffrage, TailChaste, and And My Body Became An Antenna. I’ll be doing more of those in 2013, though not one a week! [That was fun to try but a bit too much…]

At the end of November I moved from my smaller synth cave to a much bigger synth cave, downstairs in the same rehearsal space.

And I’ve spent December working on the next 24 Hours of Radio Art thingy, called Shrug, which I should have finished in the next week or so.

And aside from all the maQLu stuff, I was also writing for Spill Magazine and Discorder Magazine, DJing The Vampire’s Ball on CiTR Radio, and of course there were a ton of great shows I went to, not the least of which was finally getting to see Rammstein live in May.

Funny how it looks like a lot when I list it out now but so often through the year it seemed like nothing was happening! Anyway, here’s hoping 2013 will be even busier.