Tag: psycliq

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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!

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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

psycliq

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!

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So indie it hurts

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The internet is positively exploding with ways to get to new music. Seems that everyone’s trying to build the next hot spot for discovering new bands that nobody’s heard of yet. While I think that most of them won’t catch on, I think it’s great that people are trying so many different approaches to this whole thing, and I’m doing my best to try and get Psycliq music up into all of them.

The Sixty One is a very slick music-player-community site that I’ve just run across. I’ve started to put Psycliq songs up there, but they’ve got a one-song daily upload limit so this could take a while. Ironically, somebody already bought a copy of Results Not Typical from there, even though only ten out of the seventeen tracks have been uploaded. I kinda feel bad for that person. So, person who bought that album, if you’re reading this, just drop me a line and I’ll make sure you get the rest of your music!

Noisetrade is an interesting experiment in letting people download free music but setting out a tip jar. They limit what you can put in there, so there’s not much to speak of and most folks seem to just come for the free downloads of the latest updates.

Grooveshark is a neat little indie radio station thing, similar in concept to Last.FM. I have no idea how to extract stats from that sucker though so I have no idea if anybody’s listening. If you are listening, thank you!

I’ve got a deal in the works with Magnatune to get onto their distribution service, which will make it so that movie studios and game companies can license Psycliq tracks for their stuff. That’d be kind of awesome. They even publish under Creative Commons, which is really cool. In a bit of an odd move, they didn’t want to carry a couple of tracks, but hey. More on that whole thing once it actually goes live, and I have no idea when that’d be. Update: The Mathemagician’s Riddle is up on Magnatune right now. Other albums will be up in the next few weeks sometime.

Then there are the few distribution places that I know of but haven’t managed to break into yet, including Pandora and FiXT Music. Those would be awesome channels and would open up a whole new world of listeners, but it seems that they’re pretty picky about what gets in the door. I’m sure there are many other places out there, too, so let me know if there’s anyplace that Psycliq ought to be and isn’t.

The main music site on Bandcamp remains the official home for Psycliq music and will be the first and sometimes only place to get certain songs, like the remixes and christmas albums. And CDBaby is still one of the best places to buy physical CDs, if you’re a curmudgeon like me and still like to own atoms.

Now is a really good time to be an independent musician. There’s so much you can accomplish without the structure of the record industry. There are listeners out there that small timers could have never reached before. Unfortunately, that means that everybody else is trying to do the same thing, leading to a world of noise like none other. At least a lot of this new noise is actually pretty good in its own right.

Music

Electric Goodies and Physical Platters

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I have two cool things today! First off, for those of you who want a physical, made-of-atoms copy of Results Not Typical, the wait is over! You can now order a CD from CDBaby. Now that it’s available there, the distributors should be getting copies of things so that you can also pick it up at Amazon or order it from your local record store.

And of course, for those of you who like your music digitally, you can get it from iTunes, Amazon MP3, bandcamp, eMusic, and a bunch of other places that I don’t have links to. But just go and check your favorite music website, and if they don’t have it yet, ask!

Thing the second: I am pleased to announce the creation of the Electric Goodies Newsletter! With this newsletter, I will periodically be sending out sneak-peaks, demos, snippets, sketches, and other interesting things that will let you see into the inner workings of Psycliq. By and large, this is stuff that won’t be posted on the website or anywhere else, so if you want free MP3s and cool stuff, join today! I’ll even give you a subscription box:

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Subscribe to Psycliq's Electric Goodies Newsletter
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And once you join, invite your friends! I really do want to give list members some cool things. And who doesn’t like cool things?

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The Whole Package

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Take a look at what I got in the mail today:

The covers from CD Poster Shop came out fantastic. The quality on these is seriously impressive to me. I don’t think I’ll ever do them by hand again, even if it means I’ll probably end up with a file full of leftover cover cards here.

With the covers finally here, the packaged discs have been assembled and are off to the store. Once I get word that they’re in stock, this project will be fully released! People who have pre-ordered the album will be finding it in their mailboxes in the next couple days, assuming that I have the right addresses for them. The music should make it out into the likes of iTunes and Amazon shortly thereafter.

Production

Off to the printer

psycliq

I’ve finally settled on song content and ordering, and with a last few tweaks the artwork is done. I am happy to present the final front and back sides to the cover of Results Not Typical:

I’ve sent the artwork off to a short-run print shop to be printed on dual-sided cards. This promises to be a step up from my traditional completely-homemade approach to the problem. It’s also an experiment, and we’ll see what the quality is like and how much I care to deal with the overhead. Even though it’s a shorter run than a “real” print shop, I still had to order 50 covers. I’ll be surprised if I run out of those any time soon. Sometimes, I’m so indie it hurts.

Also! After listening to these songs over and over I’ve found that I still have a little bit of the music to polish up, but any changes from here will be simple overdubs, mixes, compressions, and things like that. I can’t afford to bring things to a mastering service, so what you hear is exactly what comes out of my speakers in the moments before upload to the web. Thankfully, though, most of the songs are recorded and mixed. And just because I love you, here’s a third bonus preview track! This one’s called “Mettle” and it’s one of my favorites from the album:

Depending on when I can get time to work out the finishing touches, we could be seeing a digital release in as little as a week. Excitement!

Music

A change of heart

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The last song I was working on for Results Not Typical just wasn’t really coming together, so I’ve decided to shelve it for now. There’s a possibility that it’ll pop out again at a future date, but who knows.

As a side effect, that means that all the music for this album is now completed. Done. Finished. This is exciting! Of course I’m likely to go tweak a few bits that bug me, I always seem to do that at the eleventh hour. But as a whole, this baby is in the can. Mmm, canned babies.

But what about the seventeen-song opus that it once was? It will still actually be seventeen songs, since as soon as I’d decided to shelve one song another one popped up. A simple 12-bar blues entitled “The Clock on the Wall in Limbo”, this one definitely has to go right in the middle someplace. No, I still haven’t picked an order yet, but I am at least working on that part. My immediate future in Psycliq will have me listening to this batch of songs again and again until I am completely sick of them, at which point I will release them for the world to hear.

Stay tuned.

Music

Album ordering

psycliq

The concept of an “album” of music has been decried by some as an outmoded restriction imposed on us in a time of physical media. To some extent, I agree with that, and what I’m doing with Mergers & Acquisitions, Inc. is in direct response to it. In that case, the track list isn’t static, and I’ll be putting more into it in the future.

However, I don’t think that the anti-album sentiment is completely true, and I’m taking a more traditional approach with Results Not Typical. In such an album, the order of presented tracks is vital. The feel of this album is quite dynamic, with soft piano on some songs, crunchy blues guitars on others, and a whole range of oddities in between. I even have one track that was recorded entirely using the Wavedrum, and nothing else. Some are long, many are short, and each is unique.

So how does one go about picking the order of songs? The best solution I’ve come up with is just listening to it again and again, paying attention to the transition points, and feeling what works and what doesn’t. The first and last songs are already settled: “Setting Out” and “Closure”, respectively. But I still have to figure out what journey I want to take people on in between. It just so happens that there’s a fair bit to see along this road.

An added consideration this time around is the fact that, for the first time, I’m going to be using a printing service to handle the insert cards for the physical CDs. Thus far, all of my physical albums have been completely home made. Now I have yet to see their results in person, but CD Poster Shop looks to be pretty promising. Small runs, pretty low cost, and almost certainly higher quality than what I could pop out of my home printer. I’ll still be running the CDs themselves at home, and they’ll still be CDRs with LightScribe-printed labels, since I don’t sell enough copies to warrant a regular replication run. But I am selling enough copies to make printing the disc inserts a bit of a pain. A downside to this is that it does add another week or two of lead time to the project being fully released, since I need to have the final song list and ordering set before I can purchase the insert cards.

As far as the album itself goes, I’m just about done with 15 of the 17 tracks right now. I might make a few tweaks to the ones that are “done” before ultimate release, but the songs are at least in their final format. The last two are at least started, and I’m on track to get it out by the end of summer. The release will almost certainly happen on Bandamp first, followed by physical sales on CDBaby, with availability on iTunes, Amazon, Amazon MP3, Rhapsody, and all kinds of other places like that following some time after.