erratum by doktorb

P&R 13

"With the exception of the remixes, and track 17— a new track that was written exclusively for this project—the music on erratum is a selection of previously released solo material that documents the evolution of this project from its earliest days online. This narrative is not presented in any sort of logical linear order because that’s not how I like to do things. The curation has been a mostly unconscious process which started by me selecting one of my favourite tracks to open the album and then letting go, allowing the sounds themselves suggest where we needed to go from there.

However, before you push play and we get where we are going it seems only fitting for a retrospective collection that I should spend the liner notes telling you something about where this project came from.

Whilst my first SoundCloud upload happened 11 years ago the seeds for this project were planted about two years earlier. In 2010, after having spent many years playing electronics in live improv bands, I suddenly found myself living in a foreign country with no access to equipment or friends to jam with. Unfamiliar with any sort of local scene in my new home I started to spend a lot of time online and discovered a bunch of pre-bandcamp era netlabels which exposed me to some of the most anarchic and freeform music I had ever heard. The magic of this music, made on computers in the time before DAWs were a household technology, was that there didn’t seem to be any rules, you used whatever tools you had available and did what you could.
The results were not always good, in fact they were often downright awful but it didn’t matter because, to me, that fact that these people were putting themselves out there, pumping out gleefully terrible nonsense with little regard for anything other than the fact that they could (so why they hell shouldn’t they?!)

Well, to me that felt like finding god!!

I realised that literally *anything* could be music and everything was creatively valid as long as it was executed with intent. You didn’t need some mythical skill set that had been defined by someone else’s understanding of what things should be. You didn’t need the right gear. Hell, you didn’t need any gear!

You just needed to be you.

So that’s what I started trying to do. I discovered Audacity and fell in love with it because it was a program so clunky and counter-intuitive that I felt like there was no correct way to use it. And over the years Audacity has become my primary instrument, a method of manipulating media so that I may speak from other people’s mouths to create moods and tell stories that couldn’t be told any other way.

To tell you the truth, I never expected much from this project. It was just a way of amusing myself, but here I am writing liner notes for a retrospective compilation that I was invited to put together. So, I guess I must have been doing something right… right?!

I hope so, because I have no intention of stopping any time soon.

Anyway, thank you to Pause & Reflect Music for giving a shit about doktorb. The fact that this release happened means the world to me!!

And thank you to all the people who have supported and encouraged me over the years, surprisingly there have been quite a lot of you. Although I am not going to try to list all your names because I know I will forget someone and feel terrible about it.

And finally, thank you to whoever you are that has decided to take the time to listen to this."

Defunct record label run by Travis Gregory aka 𝑪𝑶𝑴𝑴𝑨. All merch still on sale.

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