This year I secretly released four albums

I didn't tell anyone about them. Here's what I was up to and how you can hear them if you'd like to.

About half a year ago I threatened to start uploading tracks to my YouTube channel. The idea was to have a change from high-concept, album-sized projects and just be able to make some short tracks that don't matter very much. Instead of agonizing for weeks over details I'll just record the idea, keeping it simple and quick, and upload it as soon as it sounds OK to me.

Almost nobody engages with my YT channel and views are minimal, which made the enterprise very low-risk. It wouldn't be a big deal if I put some stuff out there and then regretted it and deleted it again. But in the process I made some music I'm pleased with, so I decided to release it more widely. Putting it on Bandcamp and charging money for it -- my usual avenue for releasing stuff these days -- seemed disrespectful given that it's available for free and it would have to sit next to much more considered things. So I only released it to the streaming services (Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon etc) and whatever shops Distrokid supports that I don't really care about either way (iTunes etc). And guess what? A few people have found and listened to them.

It made sense to me to batch up the releases into albums even though the music wasn't conceived that way, and I've finally got round to recreating those albums as playlists on YouTube. Here they are in a convenient form so you can give them a listen if you feel inclined:

Streaming them instead on services like Spotify, Amazon Unlimited or Apple Music supports me by paying me a tiny fraction of a penny each time. If the layout of this page makes it awkward to use (cross-platform web stuff is hard) and you don't have any of those services, you can find all four playlists on my YouTube channel.

I think I'll continue with this practice but I also think it's time for me to start on a proper new album. I do have some unfinished tracks and some guitar stuff that might appear on YT in the intervening time, but it's probably a good moment to start thinking about big stuff again.

Finally, since streaming services don't usually have space for credits, I'd like to explicitly credit Tengy Art for the rust texture used on the cover of Bride of the Sea and Jezael Melgoza for the beautiful photograph used (in edited form) for Ayahuasca Agrippa.