Lee Todd’s 22-year retrospective album is available on CD or for CD-quality download.
This project began with two boxes. One box contained printed copies of poems, short stories and monologues that I’d written over the past 22 years. The other contained cassette tapes of electronic sounds that I’d recorded during the same span of time. One afternoon in December of 2008, while sorting through these boxes, I resolved to share their contents with the greater public. I thought about recording my spoken words, and I thought about archiving my electronic sounds, and then, I decided to compile an album that would simultaneously feature both. In the spirit of recycled art, I selected some of my better-received text pieces and paired these with some of my better-conceived audio tracks. Suddenly, a drum loop that I’d recorded on a multichannel cassette deck in 2000 could be paired with a digital soundscape that I’d rendered from a bitmap image in 2005, which in turn, could be paired with a poem that I’d written in 1997 but never recorded until 2009. Through this process, I’ve sought to reassemble dozens of disparate parts into something substantially whole. The companion book to this album includes texts for each of the pre-composed vocal tracks, annotations detailing how or why these tracks were produced, and photographs documenting my experience and the many wonderful people with whom I’ve been privileged to share it.
