There is a trusim shared amongst amateur/indie artists like me who don't have masses of followers, that to most people, all your old tracks are still new. It's said in order to remind ourselves not to forget to keep promoting our old stuff - there's still lots of folk that still haven't heard it, and one of them might just be someones new (old) favourite track!
This was brought home to me recently when one of my oldest released tracks suddenly jumped to the top of my most played tracks lists in Spotify.
Amb0 (thats Amb-zero), was one of the first tracks I recorded solo. It was done in 1999. I had a shonky copy of Acid Pro, and a whole bunch of loops and samples I'd found in various places and started to peg them together in what I thought at the time was a sort of Bentley Rhythm Ace stylee. The results of this was my first solo album Version 1.0b and can be found on Spotify.
Around about the same time, my sometime partner in musical crime, Dan Doughty, lent me a Roland SP-808. This was sort of Rolands answer to the seminal Akai MPC - an instrument based around 16 pads which you could load samples of instruments and/or loops of music into and assign them to be triggered when you tapped one of the pads. The Akai was massively popular with lots of cool artists - not least of which was Underworld who we held in very high regard.
The album had been a fairly upbeat affair - lots of bouncy rhythms and jolly samples - fun things like Monty Python & David Koresh(!). Which meant I had a bunch of slower elements left over.
I remember chucking things into Acid, but couldn't really get a vibe going - then Dan dropped the SP808 off, and after the traditional honeymoon period of farting about and figuring out how to use it whist stubbornly refusing to open the manual, I chucked a few of the samples it - and it clicked. So much so that Amb0 was jammed out and recorded in one evening, and simply recorded directly into Audacity on my PC.
Not the SP808 that I recorded AMb0 on, but my current one
Zip Disks. You needed to feed the SP808 with them...
As I said, this was in 1999. The album has been uploaded hither and yon over the last 20 years, finally coming to rest on Spotify et al when I pushed it out through Distrokid. And there it sat. Not really doing much. I mentioned it now and again - but the track most folk picked up on was Raygun (give it a play - you'll see why).
In the ensuing years, I started doing stuff with Dan as quiddity, then back to my own solo stuff - which I've been doing for a little over a couple of years. Some of the stuff I've been doing from the start in the last batch feels old. Version feels positively archaic.
But there it is. Sat at the top of my top track for yesterday, last week and last month!
There's two reasons for that as far as I can see. Firstly, somehow Vintage Electronica stumbled across it and liked it enough to add it to their playlist. I know the name there sort of gives it away a little, but there's a lot of recent stuff in that list - I think they go for the sound, not necessarily the actual vintage - but they heard it, liked it and in it went. It was new to them and it got used.
Secondly, I sent a recent track in to Katy Jay at Skylab Radio for her Mixed Feelings show. that track didn;t make the cut but, star that she is (and in my experience this is *rare*), she toddled off and listened to more of my stuff. And chose some to use - one of which was Amb0. It didnt matter that it was old hat to me - it was new to her and was played out last Sunday. (You can listen to the show on Mixcloud here)
So this just made me remember that even though I may think a lot of my stuff is old and not as good an my new stuff - it's still new to pretty much the rest of the world. Whilst putting new stuff out is always exciting, I should not lose sight of pushing my older stuff regularly as well. I've done a couple of 'retrospective' social media campaigns, but never gone before anything off BOSH! So I intend to do another (and I'll write about what tool I'm going to use in another post) - and go back right to the start. Cos my old stuff is to all intents and purposes still new to the world.
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