Hoarder's Hope by Reptilian Brainiac

(Much like this music, every time I try to write on its origins, production, and purpose, I get bogged down in elaborate verbosity. So, just like the music, I must lay down a set of rules to lead and limit its origin story's construction)

1. Short of a short parenthetical preface, start with the rules.
2. Briefly describe history.
3. Relate history to present.
4. Describe the rules of the musical process.
5. Brief wrap up

Since the mid-eighties, I’ve been recording original music ideas, fragments, song-starters, riffs, licks, lines, rhythms, etc. on the recordable media of the day (cassette tape to microcassette to digital voice recorder to CDR to smartphone) often with the intent to extend such fragments out to full-figured musical works. Over the decades most of that obsolete media went into storage and ultimately out of sight/mind.

Sometime in the 21st century, I not only found my tendency to pour out original music works impeded, but even my stream of torrential music fragments slowed to a tedious trickle.

As a man-child with an increasingly slow-to-no flow output of the amateurish music mastery I’d come to so eagerly addend my identity with in adolescence, I found myself needing to justify my time/money/identity investments in the continued pursuit of music-making throughout adulthood. So, I shifted into an amateur self-archivist, unearthed my mound of degraded recordable media which has been storing all my sketchy music ideas held over for future elaboration, only now, I’d advanced in years so far from those fragments that I could barely relate to most, much less flesh out into complete pieces of music.

Spanning almost 4 decades now, obviously I have amassed enough musical tinker toys to Frankenstein together a figurative musical figurine or 2... or 17. So with the development and utilization of a set of self-imposed rules, that’s what I’ve done, in order to emerge from my state of musically-obstructed enlarged prostate, with these 17 songs (most combining disparate bits from the 80s, 90s, and the 00s).

Musical Process Rules:
1. Convert all music fragments from degrading media to digital audio (no arbitrary curation should be exercised during this part of the process. Capture any and all recordings).
2. Program all converted musical captures as MIDI files.
3. Combine at least 2 or more unrelated music fragments in the construction of a complete piece.
4. New music “glue” is permitted if the adjoining of disparate bits proves adhesively poor (“Glue” may refer to novel music structures constructed on the fly and not originally included in my archival revival)
5. All works must be "in-machine", no real tactile instrumental performances from my appendages and/or orifices' allowed.
6. Feel free to break any previous rule/s as I see fit.

This album's cover-art shows the metaphorical statement one of a Hoarder’s shut-in stasis, trapped by junk erroneously imagined important and enriching. Music impulses acquired in youth initially existing as admiration and emulation of other’s great works, cracked open to see how they tick, ultimately to reassemble in novel ways once one has been properly apprised of a full, formal education.

But mine is a cautionary tale since I am definitely not that. I’m a musical fragments hoarder, blurred across many fields of focus, with all my musical tidbits, parts of the play-things I broke, dismantled, ditched, lost interest in, compulsively collected during delusions of grandeur, constructed during hero-emulation days, semi-plagiaristic stages, abundant bits from that forgiving youthful phase where any and every thing one might musically churn out on the most whimpering of whims is self-regarded as creative gold, misguided musical parts and pieces from games, puzzles, product promotions, miniatures, and figurines lost, forgotten, discarded and/or disbanded once cohorts' confidence was consumed.

See, I’ve already violated my “brief wrap up” rule... but I am getting professional help.

Reptilain Brainiac is FM Watson.