...and the way they have rap mixtapes got me thinking about how in other genres like ambient and how there aren't any ambient mixtapes that I know of, the fact that you can use a mixtape as an excuse not to have anything quite as polished, the fact that sometimes we take too long worrying about every minute detail, every last little transient, bloating in the lower mids, or maybe the speaker alignment is off because it sounds fine in the car, the fact that I spent so much time on my last album and I thought that maybe giving myself strict parameters and limits would make for an interesting challenge, the fact that I often don't overthink things and when I do the songs sound almost exactly the same as they did when I started them, even though I added all those fancy plugins that emulate famous compressors that I would probably not ever want to have in person because I would not know what to do with them or maybe I'd start needing to buy racks that fit the compressors and then I would need preamps, EQs, and an assistant engineer, and with the cost of everything these days, I don't even want to think about that, the fact that I decided this ambient mixtape would be created across two days, but not even really two days, since I am only counting the time from when I drop my kids off at school to when I pick them up, and in Canada at least, the school day is about 6.5 hours, which is both too much and not enough, depending on what you want from it, and what you really wanted when you were young was recess, and when you're a teacher, you also want recess, and the only people who don't want recess are the politicians who keep harping on about standardized test scores, even though they probably would have done poorly at them, and also they went to private schools anyways and so they didn't even need to take them, the fact that during the two school days where I put together this mixtape, I worked as quickly as possible, looking for the right matches of sounds, loops, instruments, pedal chains, and often looked more for ideas than fully fleshed out songs, the fact that my melodica makes its second appearance on a song but it will be used on another that's coming out soon, and it's in some way an underrated instrument because it has a really interesting timbre, the fact that I ran all twelve songs into each other with no stop in between because I wanted it to feel like a bit of a rush, in a sense everything is a rush because there's this feeling like you have to produce, like you're not good enough unless you're creating nonstop and there's this dopamine hit when you put a song on Spotify and then manage to get it on a playlist that lots of legitimate listeners are listening to and then you see your line graph slowly go up and your bank account also slowly increase in amounts of pennies, the fact that Minus Time feels like an ethos more than it does an album title, and really this is more of an ambient mixtape anyways, but streaming services don't have a category in the dropdown menu to pick ambient mixtape as opposed to single, EP, or album, and I guess since it has twelve songs in just over a half hour it's an album but it really doesn't feel like one, the fact that it is kind of full of rendering errors, guitar noise, feedback, phasing issues, and other stuff like that, the fact that I kind of like how imperfect it is since I've always hated perfection anyways, it's too boring and lifeless, and I
am full of crap anyways, the fact that I recorded all of the songs simply with numerical titles and then decided to name them while watching the final game of the Toronto Maple Leafs season, the fact that even though by the time of the release of this ambient mixtape the Leafs will not be technically out, the name of the first song, which holds lots of my optimism for a sports team will probably soon fade and my investment, even though I know it's silly and ridiculous, will once again not result in anything of value, the fact that I was trying to figure out what to name the rest of the songs and I had the idea of Dream Gopher, which means absolutely nothing and is not in any way connected to the songs but all of a sudden if you read the track listing it feels like there's an important character arc through a series of drones and synth arpeggios but I promise that any correlation between some kind of legitimate story and the real Dream Gopher (if there is one, I Googled it and there were some theories about what happens if you dream about gophers but there wasn't a lot of discussion like there is about why your teeth always fall out in your dreams - I had one of those teeth falling out dreams recently and I should probably check what that means but I'm not really the type to read into that kind of thing), the fact that I named a song Marquee Moo, which looks like a typo but made me chuckle to myself and probably few others would think is funny, the fact that if you're not familiar with the song Marquee Moon by Television you should probably correct that soon, the fact that right before everything shut down I put an ad on Kijiji saying that I wanted to start a band that only played Marquee Moon and Sister Ray by the Velvet Underground, and someone actually answered it after a few months, and he knew a few guys, and we actually played together for a bit until lockdown caused a couple of the guys to move away and we also found that Marquee Moon is a really hard song to play, though we did pretty well with other songs, the fact that my 6-year-old daughter came up with the phrase Bedtime at Wrong Time, which she wrote onto a poster for my wife's best friend so that it could be put on her wall to remind her to go to sleep, or maybe that whenever she was going to sleep it was the wrong time, but part of that has to do with the fact that she lives three time zones away from us and so technically in our time, her bedtime is way off compared to my daughter, the fact that most song names for ambient songs are entirely arbitrary and it's way more fun to have a truly bizarre sense of humour; the fact that one of my first Kilometre Club albums not about subways was entirely too silly to be taken seriously and featured computerized voices speaking absolute nonsense which I thought was kind of funny and unique, but I quickly learned that being funny and unique doesn't always mean something is good, and in listening back I have thought about just how not good that album was even though I'm very proud of it, the fact that I think I'm fairly proud of Minus Time too, when not taken as a serious album it feels like a lot of good sketches for songs and concepts, the fact that most other musicians make things like this and then decided not to release them, whereas I throw them out to the world just a week after my major album of the year, the fact that it would be funny if this mixtape got more plays than Futures and what does that say about how much time is worth spending on the music you make, the fact that I'm guessing few will have any idea why I am writing like this and instead it feels like an inside joke enjoyed only by myself, but I'm okay with that, the fact that maybe I should just