Blin! by Fear of Tigers

It’s become a tradition. Every year, with the help of my Patreons, I release an album of brand new music on Christmas Eve. It all started back in 2018 with The Winter Album followed by 10,000 Ways To Love and last year we released Tiger Blood! This year’s offering is an experimental mini album called Blin! where I dig into my techno roots.

I first got into electronic music listening to bands like Autechre and their Warp Records peers of the era. I dreamed that this would be the kind of music I’d grow-up to make but for better or worse I was spirited away in quite a different direction. I never did get round to making a techno record - until now! Regardless of how successful or not this experiment is, it's been important for me personally to explore some of this ground, if only to get it off my chest. This record is something of a departure from the last three then, and if you’re expecting the usual hook driven euphoria of the previous albums you might be disappointed.

As an artist it’s important to experiment and not to rely on the same old tricks and I felt it was essential to try something different. Despite the short run-time of this record I created almost 50 new tracks for this album but it felt absolutely right to eliminate all the ideas that missed the mark slightly or didn’t fit the aesthetic. Your support lets me do that. Now I’ve plowed this furrow I feel like the FOT universe has expanded once again and I can bring some of these ideas into future productions that employ more of what one might consider as the classic FOT sound. It's also given me a huge amount of confidence and enthusiasm to create again in the new year.

Whether this marks a new direction or not, I don’t know. Originally I’d intended to release this under a new moniker (my own name perhaps?) but at the time of writing it feels like a FOT record, albeit one that has taken a different trajectory. Specifically there are no samples on this album, no vocals, no guitars, and no saxophones or horns. The tone is darker but in places touches on classic FOT tracks like Sirka or Original Nature. If you'd like to hear more about the making of this record, please visit my Patreon page.

Original, independent, life-affirming music