Arpland was recorded live at Botany Bay in January, 2016, using only a Yamaha QY-70 and a Tascam DR-07 digital recorder. It is one of the few finished albums that was created in that studio space that has remained unreleased, up to now. Originally meant for a cassette tape on an imprint that never got off the ground, focusing only on recordings made with the QY series of machines, and then stashed in the archives.

As the fifth anniversary of the Milieu Music Fan Club at Patreon approached, I spent a good amount of time considering what I could release to celebrate - I began work on an acoustic guitar and four-track tape machine album, which quickly became too complex to finish in time for the anniversary...I thought about doing a CH session of dub music, which mutated into River Mural and just didn't feel right for the purpose of publishing here...after getting nowhere, I began to dig through the dreadful archives (I say dreadful because my sense of organization has never been very good, and it follows that my organization in the digital data realm is even worse) looking for something I'd forgotten about, and happened upon Arpland.

Yes! Arpland would be perfect - five years of the Fan Club, five tracks - a bit of synchronicity is always nice, especially when it isn't intentional, because it feels then as if the universe is smiling upon you. So much of my adult life continues to be carrying around one question or another, until something manifests in or near my search that I determine to be an answer. Whether or not there are other forces involved besides my own very flawed human mind looking for patterns where there are none, who can know? (The Shadow knows!) For now, in this time and place, which is where you and I always find ourselves in these one-sided talks, this is enough of an answer to sate my curiosity.

And so I sat down to master these five pieces properly, as they never had been after I laid the jams down live and labeled them. I love how immediately easy on the ear they are, while also possessing a sense of relaxed restraint. The QY-70 is a marvelous and versatile machine, capable of a lot of compositional and sound-design tasks, but it lacks any kind of dedicated performance orientation, and I've long tried to use external devices to provide flesh-and-blood faders/knobs for the QY's internal digital mixing board, to better facilitate the live hands-on jams that I prefer to work through in my takes, rather than programming everything out. Arpland was done live with the QY's cumbersome internal mixer, despite its massive shortcomings, so the changes that occur in these tracks are subtle, gradual, perhaps a bit more deliberate than impulsive, and so this could be the explanation for Arpland's placid mood.

Of course, texturally it is easy to hear references to many of my favorite ambient techno albums - SAW 85-92, Voltage Control, early Paradinas and Perala, Cylobian Sunset and other gems from the Rephlex catalog - and so Quiet Yardwork feels like a playful, slightly melancholic contribution to the era of bedroom carpeted knob twiddling, and there have always been plans to return to the project, but after Arpland was completed, it just slipped away as other, newer and easier to use machines arrived in my studio. I think the last time I turned on the QY-70 was to play a bassline in the Green Pharming live set? I could be wrong, but...it's nice to see this material get some attention again, and I just might brush the dust off the QY-70 soon because of it. I seem to remember there being the building blocks of most of an entire album sitting in the pattern banks on it, just waiting for a better interface to mix them down with.

Arpland also felt apt to include in the MMFC catalog, as it follows after recordings like The Cartridge Reader's Travelogue - another recording that was created using a singular somewhat unwieldy machine (the Korg DS-10 cartridge for the Nintendo DS portable gaming system) - although it's singular nature allows for some surprising variance, with the title track's pianos sounding far better than they have any right to, given the unit's digital soundfonts being closer to general MIDI than not, or 'Aqualom' sounding a bit like an outtake from the Ocean Lion II sessions.I enjoy these songs for their vibrant simplicity, and I hope they bring you some joy when you listen to them too.

A huge debt of gratitude is owed to the longtime and current supporters of my work at Patreon, without whom Arpland would remain in stasis for who knows how much longer, as well as so many other things that happen in my creative life and output because of the financial stability and emotional support those people provide. I love you all, and here's to another five years of this weird little get-together on the internet!