It’s happened, I’ve finished The Solitary Vice. Well, in the sense that I was told I would be out of a job come this Friday and I figured I should be working on getting a new job and keeping my apartment rather than polishing the seventh Citizen Nowhere album.

You can access the download site HERE though BEWARE! There is music that plays automatically, so I’d MUTE your computer, look at it WHEN AT HOME or put on HEADPHONES.

Or, you can bypass all that and download the ZIP file by clicking HERE.

“Rachel Paton From The Future” was originally titled 010101 when, instead of The Solitary Vice, I was making an album of instrumentals that would all be named in binary. However, not only is it a pretty good representation of an instrumental that stays interesting, it’s also 100% Reason, which means not one sound in genuine. That also means that I’m playing, layering, arranging and making sure all the tracks come in with varied “ooomph” so they sound like it could be played live.

But it couldn’t. Unless you’re a saxophonist and you want to jam.

The title was changed for personal reasons, suffice it to say that Rachel Paton From The Future was a different creature in my mind when I was writing it. Now, Rachel Paton is in the middle of being very mad at me, so her future self actually does hole the mystery, danger and COMBAT that the song invokes. Now, when I listen to it, I picture a giant Rachel Paton trying to step on me as I flee through a city.

Download link “Rachel Paton From The Future” by Citizen Nowhere.

“Thank You Mario, But Our Princess Is In Another Castle” was originally made for CN6: Out Of Insight, Out Of Mind. It was a two part song: “Thank You Mario…” and “…But Our Princess Is In Another Castle.” Part One blew hard, so I cut it down to just Part Two and this song would be wonderful if I had a different voice.

download link “Thank You Mario, But…” by Citizen Nowhere

I don’t really know what I’m doing with my side-project music, but I do know that a new phase of songwriting is coming about, one that is driven by melody, since for a few months I’ve been trapped in situations where I’m trying to develop a melody to an already-established instrumental track.

“It’s You” started out as something I was singing to myself in the shower, cliche be damned. I happened to be showering while Adam, my roommate was out of the apartment, so I had the luxary of drying myself off and sitting down to record the vocals in Garageband within minutes, before the melody left my head.

The resulting insturmental part was also sung before it was written, which slowed my process a little as I had to shift keys while writing it.

Either way, the vocals on this mix are ROUGH and TOO QUIET, but otherwise, it’s a workable outline for a song that will eventually be fun to listen to.

It’s already stuck in my head, though this means little these days.

Check it out in its rough form, since there is a good chance the finished form will sound bigger, different and longer.

download link

I’m feeling a little empty behind the eyes this morning.

Going back to Colorado and seeing friends was nice (with one party-ruining exception) and spending the holidays with my parents while my brother stayed out of the country opened my eyes to some stuff.

Yesterday, I woke up at 6, blogged until 11, picked up a camera in midtown at 12, picked up yet another camera in Chinatown at 12:30, walked to The Apple Store, carried the cameras to Webster Hall at 3rd and 11th and hung out there filming Bear Hands’ live show until 11, then I took 3 cameras and a handful of P2 cards to a guy named Matt’s house, where we exported the footage only to get home by, like 2AM, watched one episode of Battlestar Galactica and passed the eff out, only to wake up at 9AM today to work on a blog…that isn’t letting me access it.

AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!

…is what I would have been screaming about two weeks ago. But something inside me that broke last December has left me with a bubble of emotion surrounding me that has little outward connection to the events that happen around me.

That or I’ve just adapted to the stress required to do all the things I’ve chosen to do for the next few months.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, something that has been a comfort to me in this interesting time is, equally unsurprisingly, one of my own songs.

I posted it earlier at ListenOrDont.com under the title 0101, when it was an instrumental binary track. Now, it’s included on The Solitary Vice (BETA), which was packaged with the year end, huge-ass-file, Citizen Nowhere Collection.

Every track I write gets shuffled in between ongoing projects to see which one if fits best with: new Citizen Nowhere, BSOD (don’t worry about that acronym for a bit), and whatever the collected tracks of Jess and I will ever be called.

Tai asked that I try doing vocals to 0101 for BSOD and what I came up with was something bizarre and too moody for BSOD. I knew it as soon as I finished it: I fucked up the vocals. Not that it doesn’t sound like I wanted it to, but I refused to stick to a melody, or a chorus. Outside of the distorted opening vocals (and that bitch of a harmony), it’s just riffing on a single loop, playing with cadence, tune and rhythm. When I wrote the song, I wrote a series of loop-able parts that I arranged to build to a chopped-up D&B breakbeat.

I got off the phone with Tai and told him I’d take another pass at it.

Then, I kept listening to it, which was my mistake.

Sometimes, I sit down with something to say and a song appears out of the ether to connect to it. This track, and most of the tracks on CN5 and CN6 were written as instrumentals and then technically beat-out to form vocals based on melody, repeating parts and cadence.

It just surprises me sometimes that I end up writing a song that expresses exactly how I’ve felt all along without paying much attention to the lyrics.

download link “I Feel The Change Becoming” by Citizen Nowhere off The Solitary Vice

There’s something inside, ‘cause I felt it kicking.
Our skin is pulled tight, and our rib cage is breaking.
I feel the change becoming.
I know that the moment if fleeting.
We’ve known that the mold is imperfect.
If you can’t beat it…
Evolve or become it…

Rise and Fall
The future feels so cyclical.
One For All
It’s hopeless, it’s happening.
We’re cynical.

Oh, God!
Who knew the metamorphosis went down like this?
Do you want to change?
Ok.
Go.

Inside me so long.
Changing me.
Gripping me.
Let it emerge, controlling.
Moving me,

It’s pushing, it’s pulling
It’s breaking me.
It’s living, it’s killing
It’s saving me.

Ok, I’m in Colorado now, and I didn’t have enough room in my luggage to bring my MIDI controller. At first this pissed me off, because my constant obsession that is referenced in the tagline of this blog. I just really need to be making an album so I have something to do that isn’t celebrity pictures or movie rumors. Otherwise I’d go crazy.

On the other hand, sometimes I take time to do music that could be better spent of celebrity pictures and movie rumors, so it’s sort of like an addiction in the sense that wanting to make music suggests I make bad decisions about my personal scheduling.

Like right now. I’m supposed to be looking up pictures of celebrities. I have another window open that has several tabs of leaked Carmen Electra Playboy photos.

Anyway, I’ve used this time without a MIDI controller to listen to tracks off of (what I was calling) zeroone on multiple devices. This album is going to clock in somewhere between 40 and 50 minutes and is getting really close to release. As both Valhalla and Out Of Insight Out Of Mind proved, none of you are that interested in high-quality AIFF files, so that saves me a lot of rendering time.

THE TITLE HAS BEEN CHANGED. I was reading about old myths of masturbation and realized that they would socially refer to choking your chicken as “the solitary vice.” Of course, I had to snatch that up for my own use. Not only is it a colloquial phrase from the past that refers to masturbation, but my inability to not work on Citizen Nowhere in 2008 was certainly a vice and one I did alone.

zeroone was called such because it was supposed to be an album of instrumentals that only had binary names. The two tracks I’ve posted from it fit this formula (0101 and 010101) and I had seven of them lined up - the seventh being 01010101010101. I was going to do this so no one read into any of the tracks, they were just music, they didn’t “document” anything sonically.

Then, one of the songs got lyrics. And I added a cover song. Things snowballed and zeroone is off. I’ll probably get around to it sometime (I’ve been listening to a bunch of film soundtracks), and I’d really like to do zeroone in the future. I like the idea of 40 minutes of insturmental tracks to plug into my iPod so I can walk aroun the city without silencing my thoughts.

Thus, CN7 is now The Solitary Vice.

IT WILL BE RELEASED TWICE. I know this sounds counter-intuitive, but I will be releasing The Solitary Vice in 2 different ways. The first way will be VERY early in 2009. Possibly even on New Year’s Day if I wake up from the hangover.

Sometime in early 2009, there will be a ZIP file of The Complete Citizen Nowhere Collection, “celebrating” five years of Personal Diary Music. That’s 8 albums, 7 of original material and 1 compilation of my favorites from the first four:

Alone In Americaland, Pretentious, III: Sin Seer, IV, Mirrors & Masks, Valhalla, Out Of Insight Out Of Mind, The Solitary Vice

It will be a honkingly huge file, but it represents five years worth of work from 2003-2008.

In the spirit of excess graphic design, the version of The Solitary Vice that appears in the massive collection will have an alt cover that looks like this:

The Solitary Vice: Complete Collection Alt Cover

After that sits in the digestive system of the brave and the few, I’ll have a few days/weeks to contemplate adding tracks to The Solitary Vice, just in case. Sometime in the first quarter of 2009, The Solitary Vice will be released with its real cover:

Citizen Nowhere VII: The Solitary Vice

Got it? Got it?

So, in anticipation of The Solitary Vice, and in the new tradition of Citizen Nowhere, I’m giving you the “promo” single with the official release announcement (that’s this post).

download link “Hey You” by Citizen Nowhere off The Solitary Vice