Azurescens - "Alien Spice"

Thanks to a couple of you for reminding me that I exist here :)

@corvidae told @albuslucimus that I play flute in my car, who then commented on a post of mind from last year which prompted me to read another post of mine from last year where I mentioned I'd be sharing a music project I was soon to release. Sadly, life got in the way and I neglected to post it here.

So here we go.

Azurescens is a collaboration between myself and a friend I had occasionally collaborated with remotely for over 10 years. Funny, I was living in Massachusetts when we did our first collab and he lived in Portland OR. I had a whole mini life where I moved to California, but eventually came to Portland myself a few years ago. We had collaborated numerous times by then so it was really fun to meet in person conveniently after all those years.

The project is named for a potent species of psychedelic mushroom that only grows in sand dunes near the mouth of the Columbia River in Oregon/Washington. They look like this:

I asked Andrew (DeeperNET) if he wanted to take over a track I had written but felt like it wasn't done and I couldn't finish it. That's track 4 on the album, so more on this later.

But after we did that one and both were so happy with it, we decided to just use the same workflow and see if we could produce more. I would sketch out the beginning ideas of a song as best I could, and he would refine it and make it sound good. Andrew has much better ears for mixing than I do by a long shot but said he felt like he was running short on ideas. I had plenty of ideas but have difficulty making them sound professional, or complete.

Andrew took a long time to master the audio, as he works in a hi-fi boutique so could spend hours listening to the tracks on various speaker systems (and probably go mad in the process). While he was doing that, I took it upon myself to make videos for each of our tracks, having practically no experience video editing. A lot was learned and while there are things I'd do differently going forward (specifically, getting better quality on some of the source video I used), I'm pretty happy with them!

Anywhere, here is track 1, "Alien Spice" which is actually the last one we completed chronologically:

(for thumbnail purposes)