oh god, i think i have a problem, i just like posting music too much. even my jewish ass can't help but get in the spirit - call this my christmas gift to you! i was recently asked to make christmas music, and this is absolutely not that (it'll happen someday, i'll be so damn seasonal you won't know what to do with me, i swear), but like the first two installments in this series, this is a bit of a dumping ground for a bunch of miscellaneous orphaned tunes that have been kicking around for months/years.

The first track here is a digitally/heavily remixed version of a song on one of several records in the works, which is a goofy, tape-recorded indie rock/bedroom pop type album with, yes, lyrics (I don't like doing this very much, do not expect much more of it after this upcoming album, which may yet be shelved depending on how i feel about it) - the remix was inspired by Markus Popp & Eriko Toyoda's amazing So album from 2002 (iirc), where Toyoda's guitar & voice were shredded to pieces by Popp's legendary glitch prowess. I am not as skilled as either party at their respective pieces of the puzzle there, but that didn't stop me from trying my hand at both!

The second track is somewhere close to two years old at this point, a quasi-math rock/idm thing that never found a home - too rock for the weird albums, too weird for any hypothetical rock albums, underproduced in some places and overproduced in others. Never quite knew what to do with it, and wasn't really happy enough with it to save it for some future album (there's still a few old tunes that are in reserve for a place where they might later fit, although who knows if/when that will happen), so it just languished in my "leftovers" folder for a while. Anyway, now i guess it's escaped.

Track 3 is probably from last December, or maybe January of this year, some point after i dropped the first Collected Tapes (which is a year old! good for it!) but had not yet decided on any sort of alternate, weirder direction for the second installment. Anyway this one is a shameless and low-effort Squarepusher pastiche which was probably more fun to make than it is to listen to.

Track 4 is, as the title implies, another guitar noodle through a Max/MSP patch. It's already been recycled into a more interesting piece of music for one of my other records-in-progress, which is more ambient/electronic/digital stuff. y'know, the "usual." I thought the original recording still sounded pretty neat, though, and didn't know what to do with it - an improv record? well, that was already disc 3 of "...and His Own Devices," and frankly, I don't have a ton of Max/MSP ideas at the moment (outside of one big one I'm working on with the intention of doing ambient livestreams), and I don't like sitting on album ideas for too long. if I end up doing a Max/MSP improv record, it'll be recorded in a manic burst of creativity like Songs for Roland was, and considering this was already remixed, it probably wouldn't end up on it anyway... so it ends up here!

Track 5 was a b-side for Collected Tapes 2 which ended up rejected because it didn't really go anywhere interesting... but it sounded pretty dope. I honestly can't remember much about this one, but IIRC it was built around plugging my bass into my usual "shoegaze" tone at the time, which was using the gain on my Alesis MidiVerb to overdrive it and then *also* overdriving my Tascam Portastudio's preamps. It sounded like garbage and it was beautiful. Now for gain i use the Sherman Filterbank, which actually sounds awesome, so it's obviously a little less fun. Goofy feedback-heavy industrial pounding bass silliness. Whatever distortion i put on the snare ended up being what might be the stupidest sound i've ever made.

There are 3 bonus tracks included in the download - one is a jangly little cover of Next Time Might Be Your Time by the late "Blue" Gene Tyranny, which there's not much to say about other than i felt i had to pay respects to the guy somehow and that's one of my favorite songs. The second bonus track is a beat tape of sorts - my trusty Elektron Digitakt has been the primary sequencer and drum machine for most of my tape-recorded music over the past year and a half, but I've had it for closer to three years, so there's a lot of little unfinished projects lodged in it's memory that haven't become more. I'm hoping to upgrade it to an Octatrack soon, so time was running out to permanently enshrine these sketches and ideas, which range anywhere from 10% to 70% song-y-ness. 11 minutes of questionable sample flips, like a peek inside the past few years of my head, or at least, the Digitakt part of it. The third bonus track is so stupid I felt i had to share - because of my horrifying and unprofessional recording habits, which i will absolutely not be elaborating on because one day i hope to work in this industry and this is very much a "do not tell anyone how i live" situation, sometimes my audio interface shits the bed and sputters out an array of increasingly ridiculous glitches without actually interrupting the audio stream - so all of it can be recorded. Usually I don't, but with this version of Collected Tapes III's TV Show Theme, I recorded the whole thing. It sucks. It's annoying as hell. It makes me laugh. Maybe it will make you laugh too? who knows! not me!