The Early Explorations Series

This album has known many guises. The current, final one ("Early Explorations Vol. 2c", released 20th January 2025) satisfies a long-held ambition for a different album (2000’s “Dada Performance 69” was meant to be chopped up into individual bars and recompiled in random order). The 1999 “Russ Luigolio’s Soundtrack to 'il treno'” was originally 45 minutes long. Then it was deconstructed into several selections and distributed as mp3 files in various online spaces too old and too numerous to now clearly trace. In 2021 the full album was edited to remove any trace of the ambient contribution of others (bar the background train journey recording), repackaged as only six tracks. Dissatisfaction with this approach resulted in it being struck down such that it now ceases to exist. Released anew as “Early Explorations Vol. 2a” (13th December 2024) under the original Lugubrious 78 performance name, the six revised tracks were recompiled into a 41-minute track and released as “Early Explorations, Vol. 2b” (released 20th December 2024). Early Explorations Vol. 2a retained the pseudo-dystopian titles from the vanquished volume ("The Transient Protagonist", “What Are These Lives?”, “Mundane Sounds from Everyday Life”, “Everyone Carries on Regardless”, “Encounters Against Their Will”, “There Is No Return”) that vaguely honour the original train journey and album.

“Early Explorations Vol. 2c” took 2b and split it into bars lasting two seconds each at an arbitrary 120 bpm. Roughly 30% was extracted, corresponding to 366 bars, representing each day in a leap year. These bars were recompiled in random order resulting in “366 Days Inside the Mind”. The start and end bars of 2b were still used to frame 366. If there were duplicates in the random bar selection, a further unique, random bar selection was made to replace it. What order emerges from controlled chaos? For “What Remains? (Part 1)” and “What Remains? (Part 2)”, the remaining bars were recompiled in their original order but excluding the extracted bars. What happens to the whole when so much is removed? Is it still distinguishable? Does it lose its form or purpose? Or does everything still proceed with barely any change, within acceptable bounds? How much more can it lose? How pervasive the pretension?

The three remaining tracks on 2c were constructed from the first three using a favourite compositional technique: dropping separate pieces of music on top of each other to see the emerging interplay of disparate sounds. This approach had already been used in the original work. The combined (roughly) 14-minutes of “What Remains Parts 1 and 2” were chopped into pieces each half the length of the one before (with a couple of seconds gained somewhere for good measure): “Memories of Early Experience” (8:08), “The Shameless Regurgitation of Prior Successes” (4:04), and “Carelessly Championing the Monied Lies of Powerful Charlatans Creating Chaos” (2:02).

Will there be more?