Tag: music

Music

“The Cure for Chaos Theory” Available Now

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The Cure for Chaos Theory Album CoverAfter nearly four years of work consisting of about a dozen starts, stops, and restarts, The Cure for Chaos Theory is now available to the world!

The 17-track album is a journey of new original music comprised of electronic rock, alternative, experimental noise, indietronic, and ambient, among others. Through it all, this project is still definitively Psycliq, and we believe it’s some of the best work to date. Standout instrumental tracks include “Her Ice-Lit Walk“, “Rewire“, and the enigmatic “Sad, I Could Have Made You Queen Of The Seas“. And for the first time ever, the album features a guest vocalist: introducing the incredibly talented Jon Wiltzen featured on “Brushwork“.

You can pick up a copy today in a variety of locations. First off, you can listen to the whole album for free at our music website. There, you can also buy the album as a digital download or as a physical CD with full-color artwork. If you buy the CD directly from us, you can even request that it be signed or get a little dinosaur drawing or something. (Note: quality of dinosaur drawing not guaranteed.)

Second, the album is now available digitally on iTunes, Amazon MP3, Spotify, and CD Baby MP3. The album will also soon be available from many other services in both digital and physical formats, so if it’s not in your favorite online store or service yet, just give them a couple weeks to catch up.

Missed an album? Name your price

In celebration of the release of the new album, the entire back catalogue of Psycliq music is now available for download in a name-your-price offer through our music site, with no minimum price. For a limited time, you can pick up The Mathemagician’s Riddle, halt, Results Not Typical, and House of the Rising Sun all for whatever you think they’re worth. And that includes FREE. You’ll be given the opportunity to pay more than nothing, if you want to, but that’s a decision to be made between you and your own crushing guilt.

Psycliq Live

If you’re in the Boston area, you should soon have an opportunity to Psycliq play live. I’ve been re-configuring a number of tracks to work in a one-man-band setup, with live parts for some of the guitars, vocals, and synths. Keep an eye on the website as well as Facebook and Twitter to learn about upcoming shows, and come support local music!

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Pre-order (and preview) The Cure for Chaos Theory

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We’ve got some exciting news to announce today, and it’s been a long time coming.

The Cure for Chaos Theory Album CoverStarting today, right now, you can pre-order The Cure for Chaos Theory from our music shop! You can pre-order the digital album, a signed copy of the physical CD, a limited edition t-shirt, a limited edition poster, or a combination pack of all of the above. The proceeds of all pre-orders will go toward the final production costs of the album, including final mixing, mastering, and disc printing. By buying now ahead of time, you can really help us out in getting things finished.

But that’s not all! Even though the final release of the album has been pushed back a bit into 2014, you can stream the rough mixes of all the finished tracks right from our music site. Note that these aren’t the final mixes, and they’re still unmastered. This means that the tracks won’t sound as clear or as strong as the final mixes, and that the music will overall be a little quiet. But the content of the songs is all there, and I’d rather you get to hear what’s coming now than have to wait until it’s finalized.

And as an added bonus, all pre-orders come with an immediate download of the rough-mix tracks! That’s right, to say thanks for pre-ordering the album, you get a copy of the music in this rare rough-mix form. When the album is finally released, these rough mix tracks will disappear from the interwebs completely, and you alone will be holding a rare digital artifact.

So go on, listen to the new tracks and pre-order the final album today!

Music

Introducing the side project: Painted Windows

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Painted WindowsAfter about six months of figuring out how to meaningfully collaborate with another musician, I’m very happy to introduce all of you to my first real side project, Painted Windows. This is a collaboration between me and Kerry, a very talented lyricist and vocalist that I met during the Game of Bands competitions on Reddit. I’m handling most of the music writing production on the project, and she’s handling most of the words and signing bits. It’s a balance that’s working out well so far, and we’re very happy to announce immediate availability of our first track together, “Obscura”. We’re very excited to be able to release this track and are looking forward to many more works as Painted Windows going forward. Hope you enjoy it.

Of course, some of you may be asking, “Is this the end of Psycliq?” Rest assured, Psycliq isn’t going anywhere. Work continues on the new album, and we’re still anticipating a release by the end of this year.

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Chaos Theory: Album Progress

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I’m glad to report that The Cure For Chaos Theory is progressing well, even though such progress never as quickly or as smoothly as I’d like it to. Personal life and other projects always seem to conspire to take me out of the studio. Even so, as of tonight there are eleven songs that are complete (apart from the final mixing and mastering), with another nine in various states of progress from early scratch track to full demo recording.

There’s still a long way to go, I admit, but we’re still hoping to have things out by the end of 2013, so don’t cross Psycliq off of your Christmas list quite yet. And in the mean time, there are some other cool things happening that you’ll like. Probably. Keep listening.

Music

New Album Coming: The Cure for Chaos Theory

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If you’ve been following us on Twitter or Facebook, you’ll already know that we’ve been working on a new album for quite a while now. If you’re a newsletter subscriber, you’ve been privilege to more information about the project than everyone else and have even heard some preview tracks.

But I think it’s high time we take the shroud off of this.

The Cure for Chaos Theory Album CoverComing in the Fall of 2013, The Cure For Chaos Theory, the latest full-length album from Psycliq. The most ambitious project by band to date, The Cure For Chaos Theory promises to be a unique musical journey through space and time. Right now there are about twenty songs written for the album, with a little over half of those in a nearly-complete state. The album is going to have three distinct “chapters” to it, exploring different musical and thematic aspects of it. We’re taking a much more heavy-electronica path on much of this album, but styles also include driving rock and subtle ambient, all mixed together like you’d expect. There will even be vocals!

I’m pretty excited about how this project is coming out, even if it is turning out to be a huge amount of production work. Much of this material has been a long time coming, but I think it’s really going to be worth the wait.

We don’t have a definite release date yet, but we’re shooting for Fall of 2013 to have it all wrapped up. Once we get things a little further along, we’ll put up a preorder page for everyone. If there’s enough interest, we could even do a short run of special-edition t-shirts and posters to go with the CD release.

Exciting times ahead, friends. Be sure to keep tuned and you may even hear a track preview in the near future…

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The Mathemagician’s Remix

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Five years ago, I released the very first Psycliq album on an unsuspecting public: The Mathemagician’s Riddle. While I had put together a few songs in the past, this five-song EP was the first time I had seriously sat down with a multi-track recording setup and tried to put together a collection. Even today, I can hear the learning experience I went through in these songs. But now, five years after its first release, I want you to chop it to pieces.

Some time ago, I went through the effort of bouncing out individual tracks for all songs that had been previously recorded. This was a tricky endeavor, especially for the tracks from Mathemagician, since a lot of the software that I had used to create the album no longer worked quite right. I had upgraded my computer, reinstalled my OS, upgraded software versions, and all manner of things that fought against the stasis these plugins so deeply desired. But with enough fiddling, I managed to get everything into a state where I could bounce out the audio to each track and call it a day. Needless to say, I do this immediately with any newly-recorded material now.

Therefore, I’ve decided to make the remix stems for all five songs on the Mathemagician EP available for free download to anyone who wants to use them. These stems are licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY, so go to town. I have only one condition: I want to hear your remixes! I want to know what the internet can do with a set of silly little songs that I wrote so long ago.

You can download them from Dropbox at the following links:

Happy remixing!

Music

He Who Saw The Deep

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Recently I’ve been turned on to Reddit, a kind of collaborative community news filter with a large dose of hyperspecialization sprinkled in. In any case, I stumbled across a subsection there called Game Of Bands. This section hosts a competition where musicians, vocalists, and lyricists get dropped into random teams and are given one week to create a track, from scratch.

Since I obviously didn’t already have enough to do in life, I decided that I’d throw my hat into the ring and write some music. I was looking forward to the collaboration and getting to step out of my comfort zone a bit. My team decided to build a track based on the Epic of Gilgamesh, trying to cover as much of the story as we could in a four-minute song. I got placed with some very talented team mates who really knocked their parts out of the park. As valiant as our effort was, we didn’t end up winning the competition, but overall I’m quite happy with how it came out. Here, listen for yourself:

I’m especially fond of the contrast between the electric piano and bluesy, understated guitar in the jazzy verses and the pounding drums and synths in the soaring choruses. I’ve decided to dub this genre “symphonic jazzmetal”, since I don’t know what else I could call it.

But whatever you want to call it, it’s now a free download as part of the ever-growing Mergers & Acquisitions free pseudo-album. Enjoy!

Music

House of the Rising CD

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Originally, I was going to keep House of the Rising Sun a digital–only product, since I’m continuously told that that’s the future. We’ve sold a few copies that way, sure, but something was just nagging me about it. I finally just admitted that I’m a bit of a curmudgeon and went ahead and put together a physical CD package. Here you go.

These puppies are printed up by CreateSpace, the same company that now handles all of the copies of Results Not Typical. I was pretty happy with how Results came out and decided to give them another go.  (Side note: those of you that picked up the first edition of Results now have something very, very rare, since I’m not planning on printing any more of those myself, probably ever. Wait 30 years before you put it on eBay to really drive up the value.)

Honestly, the print quality isn’t as nice or consistent as a pressed CD, but it is darned close, and there’s no minimum order. In fact, there’s no warehouse of these anywhere! CreateSpace just cranks them out as people place their orders.

So what are you waiting for? Go put them to work! You can even get it in time for Christmas if you order soon.

Speaking of Christmas, work still continues on this year’s free Christmas track, and I’m hoping that it’ll be all put together by the end of the week. It’s turning out to be quite interesting so far. I may have spilled some dubstep on it, too.

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Still Alive, Approaching the Holidays

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I still function! Though with the month I’ve had, that’s somewhat surprising. I did manage to get into the studio long enough to lay down some ideas on a couple of songs for the next album. I like where things are going so far, and there’s still a lot of potential to be had. I haven’t really begun recording in earnest yet, and with the holiday season soon upon us I won’t likely dive into full production mode until the new year has landed. With that in mind, I’m currently thinking I’ll be able to have the new full album in your hands sometime mid to late next year. If you want to be among the first to hear about it, sign up for the newsletter mailing list! I’ll announce behind-the-scenes plans there before anywhere else.

Speaking of the holidays, this means that it’s time to pick out this year’s Christmas song. For those of you just joining us, for the past few years I’ve taken some time away from regular music production to put my own personal touch on a Christmas classic and released it for free on the site here. I’ve already covered “Angels We Have Heard On High,” “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas,” “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” and last year’s “In The Bleak Midwinter.” That leaves quite a lot to choose from, and I need your help to decide what to do this year. Frontrunners are:

  • Winter Wonderland
  • Away In A Manger
  • I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day
  • Little Drummer Boy

Although I am definitely open to suggestions. Want to vote? Comment here or on Facebook, tweet at us, send an email, or dispatch a courier pigeon to a predetermined set of coordinates with your desires inscribed upon it. But however you do it, let us know what you want for Christmas from Psycliq, and we’ll do what we can to get it to you!

Music

The Telegraph EP

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Update: This album is no longer available for download.

Last week, my wife and son were out of town and I had the house to myself. I’m given to understand that this is when a poor bedraggled husband like myself is supposed to drink beer and watch Bruce Willis movies. Unfortunately for such plans, I am not a fan of beer and my wife is a fan of Bruce Willis movies and would have been upset if I’d had a marathon without her.

So what’s a man to do but hole up in the studio and record a whole new album! Ladies and gentlemen, I present The Telegraph EP.

OK, so it’s not exactly a whole new album. It’s more of an EP of cover songs. I recorded all six of these songs in straight takes with just an acoustic guitar and a vocal mic. No overdubbing, no special effects (apart from a touch of EQ and reverb to compensate for the terrible room acoustics I have here), and no fancy packaging. What you get is a raw collection of six acoustic tracks, not available anywhere else. And you can download it for FREE, right now!

But, I will admit, there’s a bit of a catch. In a world of constant availability and unexpiring archives, I wanted this little album to be something different. It was recorded on a whim with very little forethought or afterthought (or midthought at that rate), and while I want people to hear it, it’s going to vanish just as quickly as it came into being.

Starting tonight, the Telegraph EP will therefore remain available for free online for up to three weeks or fifty downloads, whichever comes first. At that point, it will takes its place in history. I don’t plan on doing any physical CD versions of it or releasing it on iTunes or anywhere else. It’s going to be a bandcamp-exclusive digital-only limited-time limited-quantity (and yet totally free) flash in the digital pan. After you’ve downloaded your copy, please tell all of your friends to grab a copy, too! Bandcamp even makes this easy with a little “share” button.

So why are you still here reading? Go download your copy today and be a part of history!