I have decided to release my Digital Deviant album which has been some time on its way, in part due to my own aversions. For years I believed - or wanted to believe - releasing music the way it happened when I was a child was something of the past, that the internet would change things and make for a completely different distribution system. Some of us were naive enough, for a while, to believe things would even be better, more fair. Of course this is not what actually happened and I've reached the conclusion the old ways of releasing and distributing music most probably won't die before we all do. It's a generational thing, I suppose, and for all its razzle-dazzle antics the music industry was always essentially rather conservative and certainly still is. I would say even more so today. Which is why I never really wanted anything to do with it.
People around me, not the least my musicians, managed to gradually convince me to do a release and for a while I considered labels, even contacted a few rather half-heartedly. Given my ambivalent feelings about releasing and especially selling music it really didn't feel right to involve third parties so I decided to do things myself. Which is usually how I do things anyway. I'm still not keen on the idea of selling my music, I honestly don't feel comfortable in the role of a product. I love making the music and performing it in concert. The idea of selling it makes me uneasy, that's simply how it is but it is a game I will have to try and play.
Enough of the whining - Digital Deviant is a concept album of sorts, a comment on digital culture for better and for worse, a few thoughts on the future we were promised and the present we ended up with instead. I have covered many styles of music over the years but I think I consider the ten songs, well, technically speaking nine songs and one instrumental, that make up the Digital Deviant album pop songs of sorts, in that they mostly make use of various types of verse-chorus structures. And then most of them are rather upbeat. To me pop music seemed the right language for addressing and commenting on digital culture since pop music, in the broadest sense of that term, has been the most prevalent musical language the last hundred years or so.
And there you have it - a collection of songs dealing with computer game euphoria and hacker culture, with cybersex and revenge porn, with internet communication and loneliness, everyday events of the 21st century. The album is released first digitally and physically on cd but if I prove good enough at the selling game - and you willing enough - I hope to also do a vinyl release of the album in a not too distant future.
Klub Golem in Odense, Denmark, November 30, will see us do a release concert - and every guest will receive an album on arrival, so we sincerely hope to see many of you there. And see? I told you I'm no good at the selling game.
Copyright: Ras Bolding 2024