During January and February 2026, roughly eight hours of drum improvisations were recorded in the Lugubrious 78 Studios. Improvisation overstates it. Talentless drumming without conscious thought: automatism may be more accurate (if that is not too lofty a claim itself?). Thirty-two pieces were improvised, ranging in length from about four minutes to just over thirty-three minutes. For each recording, twenty-seven tracks (for twenty-two pieces) or twenty-eight tracks (for the remaining ten pieces) were recorded (although one piece was accidentally duplicated), each covering the left or right stereo channel of different drums. This resulted in 874 individual files totalling just over 137 hours of recorded drum parts. Some of these original files contained the master channel(s) recording(s) from the thirty-two improvisations, which helped preserve some of the full kit drum improvisations going into the next stage. Treated as entirely unrelated recordings, the individual files were then chopped into one-second sections, randomised, and recompiled into 588 three-minute files. Any unused parts of the original recordings were randomly discarded during this process. The Chop Randomise Recompile Discard process does not distinguish between the whole kit and individual drum recordings. Subsequently, twenty-eight new pieces were constructed by creating twenty-one tracks for each. Each new piece was built using the order of the three-minute files (i.e. piece one (‘Reflections on Instability’) used tracks one to twenty-one, the second piece (‘Early Fantasies’) used tracks twenty-two to forty-two, and the final piece (‘Progress Is Slow. Reversal Is Rapid.’) used tracks 568 to 588). Each of the twenty-one instrument tracks occupied a different position in the stereo field. This approach essentially overlays potentially unrelated drum parts while subtly separating them. Each three-minute piece was then mastered to three minutes and two seconds, and split across two fourteen-piece volumes for release as part of the ‘Drum Automatism Series 2026':
Broken Streams of Consciousness (Drum Automatism, Vol. 1)
Collage of Sliced Improvisations (Drum Automatism, Vol. 2)