So it’s like this: now I have a Posterous site as well as my main blog and music site, Facebook page, Google Plus site, SoundCloud page, ReverbNation page, BandCamp site, and MySpace page. Not quite sure yet how I’ll work this site in with my usual distribution network, but who cares? I’m one step closer to having an account on every damn social media site imaginable! I shall likely find it very useful in that it will make it considerably easier for me to update all my many promotional platforms in one fell swoop–a godsend in this age of myriad networks and DIY promotion.

So, to get things started, by way of testing the efficacy of this service, I’m uploading a bunch of moody images taken using the Hipstamatic application for my iPhone. If you’re unfamiliar with my work, these photos prettymuch set the tone for what my audiovisual aesthetic looks/sounds like. They were all taken in California University of Pennsylvania‘s Old Main building–a lovely example of 19th-Century red brick architecture which I’m sure would’ve pleased H. P. Lovecraft immensely.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Nonetheless, I’ve been working on the album in my free time, and it’s just about completely done. I also acquired the latest version of iZotope‘s Ozone, which I’ll be using to master to the beast–so this should be the finest album I’ve put out to date!

Here are two new(ish) sample tracks from the album to whet your appetite until I finish the whole thing!

Derek C. F. Pegritz – Traum (or Trauma) by derekcfpegritz

Derek C. F. Pegritz – Idle Days on the Yann by derekcfpegritz

I’ll have a little more to say about the history of these two songs later this weekend!

Derek C. F. Pegritz – Low Hill by derekcfpegritz

Oneirophrenia will be released via Bandcamp.com (mainly so you can choose whatever audio-file format you want it in) on January 18, 2011. Expect lots of murky, twitchy, pitch-black, and ever-shifting dreamlike ambience to lull you to bed and then poison your subconscious with knowledge no waking human mind could handle. Keep your eyes/ears/appendages peeled for further sample tracks and other news.

At present, the track is available on all the websites which I use for promotion and fan contact: Soundcloud, MySpace, and ReverbNation. You can download the track on all sites but Reverb Nation–and here’s why: ReverbNation has a stupid, counterproductive 8mb cap on uploaded files, which means the high-quality 192kbps mp3 available on every other site is 1.9mb too damn big for ReverbNation’s Kate Moss-sized servers. Even a 160kbps file is too guddemn big for them! So, I uploaded a shitty 128kbps (shudder) version for streaming on that jack-leg site, and kindly request everyone who wants to download the real high-quality sample track to go to SoundCloud or MySpace and grab it from there.

Since I like talking about myself and my work, here’s a little bit of background information on “Low Hill” and the laborious, years-long process which brought it to this point! “Low Hill” was originally written in early 2005, and was inspired by the girl I was crushing on at that time. She lived in a small town in southeastern Washington County, PA, called Low Hill (which really did have pretty low hills, at least in comparison to the steep-as-hell, doesn’t-have-a-”down”-side rivervalley hills I’m used to in southwestern Pennsylvania). Now, here’s the thing: I’ve lived in southwestern PA my entire life. I’ve lived in Fayette County most of my life. The area in general, and Fayette County in particular, is Lovecraft country: deep, spooky glens where sunlight never shines; backwoods tribes of decadent rednecks living in the remains of farmhouses dating back to the Revolutionary War; strange ruins rusting beneath eldritch trees caked with fungous platters of rot; fish-people living along the Monongahela and people with even-stranger deformities roaming the streets of Connellsville in broad daylight. I’m used to living in an H. P. Lovecraft story–it’s one of the reasons I have an MA in the guy’s work, and the primary reason I like to write creepy music. But Low Hill….Low Hill creeped me the fuck out.

It’s not that Kirsten’s house was in a particularly lonely, out-of-the-way area–you could see the lights of Route 88 (the main road through town) and her neighbour’s house if you just looked around. She didn’t live in a creepy house, or have creepy parents, and she herself wasn’t creepy in any way. OK, yeah, the old garage/barn-thing slumping in one corner of the yard was a little eerie, but only in certain lights–and, at any rate, it contained nothing but an old truck (I think) and some random garage-detritus.

No, the thing about Low Hill was its unearthly silence. Now, admittedly, I was there in January, that most silent and dead of months. But even so, there was a palpable, echo-less silence about her area that just sucked the life out of me. The darkness had a thick, cloying quality, as if it were made of some glutinous black syrup that would seep into your ears and block out all sound. If it weren’t for the fact that Kirsten was such a great chick–and ridiculously, jaw-breakingly hot–I never, never would’ve gone back there.* I’ve seen shit that’d turn you white–like floating balls of fire, and soul-hungry waves of living blackness–but that unearthly silence still gave me a case of the jimjams.

I hadn’t written much for a while at that time: I had hit a creative slump a few months back that just wouldn’t go away. But, because Kirsten inspired me (as females are wont to do with me), I started sewing together “Low Hill” as an attempt to capture that eerie feeling that came over me whenever I was near her house. I had just started getting Computer Music magazine, and had a nice stock of high-quality instrument files from their monthly sample collections compiled on my hard-drive, so I started futzing around with sounds that said to me: “awful enveloping silence and weird, vertiginous, dreamlike sensations.” (And as for the latter, I was thinking more along the lines of lying in bed, wondering whether the strange squelching noises coming from downstairs are real or whether you’re still dreaming, not being dizzy because the girl your with is so damn cute and nice.)

I wrote this track in five days, I think. Kirsten thought it was totally cool. So did everyone else who heard it.

I never did much with it, though–and I’m really not sure why. From the start, I thought it was a fine work: it has a bad-assed bassline, a nice up-and-down dynamic crescendoing to a cathartic ambient outro, and one of my favourite samples in the world–Sergant Connie Mills’ (Laura Linney) description of her strange dream from one of my favourite movies, The Mothman Prophecies–in the “bridge.” But I never uploaded it to MySpace. Never did more with it than hand it out to folks on CD-R, or send ‘em mp3s. I did use it as a stock song for playing live shows as Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos (calling it “Mouth of Rivers” for a while, just because I thought it sounded more Crawlingly Chaotic), through 2008, but I’ve never been a frequent live performer, so….

When I decided to put out Oneirophrenia, “Low Hill” was one of the first tracks I rescued from the bin to modernize, slap into shape, and polish to a high shine–mainly because of the dream sample in the middle, but also because…hell, it’s a good jam! Its day has finally come! I did a lot of re-mixing, sample-swapping, and FX-adding to get it from its “primal” state to the big, full-sounding state it exists in presently, but I did not change one thing about the beat, the bassline, or the general composition of the song: I just made it sound fuller and replaced some samples, like the snare hit, with different sounds that I thought complemented the mix better than those I’d originally used. I still have the original version of “Low Hill,” though, and I’ll upload it sometime so you can compare the two and see how much I’ve learned about music and mastering since 2005.

And there you have it: the story of “Low Hill.” I can see by the ol’ clock in the corner of the screen that’s it late, though, and I’ve a Kindle full of transhumanist sci-fi and Lovecraftian pr0n waiting for me by my bed. Until I have something more to say, sweet dreams are made of this.

*Kirsten and I are still friends, and I went back to her place in 2008, I believe it was, in the middle of summer. The strange stifling menace that hung over the place in January, 2005, was mostly gone–but even at the height of a lovely summer day, it was still surprisingly quiet there….

As always, the gorgeous imagery comes courtesy of aRvin Clay of Freeze Frame Reality fame. Though aRvin’s considerable electronic music talents aren’t featured on this particular album, he is my constant collaborator in many musical projects, as well as one of my primary inspirations (i.e., he bugs me to put out new stuff until I finally give in and do so just to shut him up)–and the default artist for prettymuch all of my musical projects these days. He’s a remarkably-talented photographer, so have a look at his website for photo work even more awesome than this.

The music on Oneirophrenia is all somewhere between 5 years and 2 days old. I’ve had a bunch of tracks just sitting unfinished on my hard-drive for some time now, and I just decided one day (X-mass Day, to be exact) to pull together the best of them, finish them up, polish them to a high digital shine–or, at least, a proper steampunkish dusty sepia–and offer them up as my first new published work in…hell, I don’t even know how long. “But why take a bunch of moldy ol’ tracks, blow the cobwebs off of them, and toss them out as a Brand New Album, though, when you could very well be writing all new material?” you ask. Good question. Allow me to proffer a proper answer.

Having now put in one semester on a Commercial Music Technology degree at California University of PA, I’ve already noticed the sophistication and quality of my musical output increasing…mainly because I now know what such things as scales, chords, and modulation are. As part of the programme, I’ve been writing music that really puts a lot of my past work to utter shame–as you will find out later this year, when I drop a metric shit-tonne of new jams on you! However, a number of the tracks that I’ve written over the past five/six years still strike me as being particularly good despite their sometimes-amateurish composition. Many of these tracks were originally intended to be part of my Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, project, but because of such things as ever-changing work schedules and health crises I’ve just never been able to get together with the rest of the Crawling Chaos crew to get the tracks finished. Fortunately, not only do I have access to better recording equipment now, I’ve also expanded my studio kit of VST instruments, ROMplers, and sample-sets to represent a considerably more diverse collection of instruments and sounds. Now is the time, I thought, to collect some of those old, unfinished tracks, and really complete them now–to give them every opportunity to live up to their considerable potential! Thus, Oneirophrenia.

I’ve also been hankering for oldskool, sample-heavy industrial a la Skinny Puppy, Front Line Assembly, Xorcist, Kode IV, and Front 242 lately. This was the music that first got me interested in writing my own stuff, and showed me how to do so via electronics. Thus, many of these tracks have a distinctly “’90s industrial” sound to them, especially since many of them are positively loaded with creepy vocal samples from old sci-fi and horror movies. But Oneirophrenia isn’t going to be an exhibit of industrial archaeology, much less an industrial dance album–but it definitely has a pronounced flavour of the era. That flavour, though, is spiced with an incredibly wide range of complementary sounds, though, ranging from tortured violins to snippets of classical symphonic composition to Mini-Moog basslines to time-stretched vocal screeches. The album’s absolutely packed solid with Sounds That Should Not Be, and I personally guarantee that it will creep out your neighbours, scare children away from your front lawn, and perhaps damage your psyche in a number of irreparable, though enjoyable, ways.

I’ll keep you all posted as the work comes along! The final version of the album will be available through BandCamp, as that site allows you to download whatever audio formats you desire–from high-quality mp3s to lossless FLACs. Don’t worry, though: it’s going to be free, as always! In the meantime, as I finish individual tracks, I’ll be posted downloadable mp3 versions of them on my SoundCloud, Reverb Nation, and MySpace pages as usual so you can see what you’ll be getting.

Sound good? OK. Brace yourself. The old asylum’s been torn down, and what was locked inside its crumbling walls all those years has been released….

“So, Pegritz,” you ask, “what’re you planning on publishing here? PLEASE tell us you’re not just going to be assailing the Web with stories about your wang’s sordid adventures or 10,000-word rants detailing every last one of Stephenie Meyer’s Crimes Against Literature.”

Welllllll…sorry, folks, but you’ve got to expect some wang tales and anti-Bad Writing screeds–because this is my motherfuckin’ blog, and I’m gonna fill it up with whatever I damnwell feel like writing in it! However, I’m not about to waste readers’ time with trivial accounts of how many hours I spent playing StarCraft II on any given day, what my cat threw up on the bed this morning*, or what the doctor told me to do about that rash on my coccyx. My quotidian affairs are barely of interest to me, much less you, my fickle-dickle Internet audience. Instead, I promise to only write about thought-provoking subjects–stuff that’ll make you go, “Hmmmmm,” or maybe, “OH SHIT, REALLY?!”

Other than that…I can’t really be more specific. Mainly because I like writing about…uhhh, everything. Music. Writing. Politics. Geology. Astronomy. Nanotechnology. Gardening. Cats. Computer peripherals. Over-the-counter drugs. Batteries. Synthesizers. Typography. Football (and by that I mean real football, not soccer). Caffeinated beverages. Movies. Woodworking. Robotics. Zen philosophy. Decadent poetry. Stories about the dumb crap my friends and I have done over the years. Operating systems. Jars. Coins of the Ancient World. Abyssal plains. H. P. Lovecraft stories. English rhetoric and pedagogy in post-secondary learning environments. Rubber chickens. Guiness beer. Wireless technology. Transhumanism. The writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Victorian medicine. Croatian swear-words. Tijuana donkey shows. Ghostbusters. The life and times of Theodore Roosevelt. Chinese cuisine. Post-It notes. Ponzi schemes. Wildflowers of Southwestern Pennsylvania. Steam locomotives. Quantum teleportation. Fibromyalgia. The shittiness of Dean Koontz’s novels after 1989. Drywall techniques. Cantorian transfinite ordinals. Gradeschool follies. Medical antiques. Gothic art. Crabs. Ornithopters. Mung.

Basically, I plan on writing a whole lot of stuff about a whole lot of things, but you’ll no doubt quickly discover that, as I am a student once more at California University of Pennsylvania in their new Commercial Music Technology programme, and I am primarily a music fiend/recording artist these days, I’ll probably have a lot to say about that.

So howsabout clicking on the words SUBSCRIBE over there on the left and hookin’ yourself up with a Pegritzblog RSS or Atom feed so that you can get my bitching and moaning astute commentary on the arts and education delivered right to your favourite aggregator or reader whenever I get off my lazy ass and actually post something? C’mon, don’t do it for me–do it for yourself. Isn’t it time you did something for you?

So, uhhh…get ready—–get set———–annnnnd—————–WAIT FOR ME TO POST SOMETHING WORTH READING!

*Unless she threw up something awesome, like a gnome skeleton or a mouse-shaped diamond ring.