Project: alphabets
Series: Album a Month — Month 12 (second of two December 2009 releases)
Release date: December 2009
Archive location: _Documentation/Music/alphabets/SFTWRSYNTHZdec09
Tracks: 8
Format: MP3
The title is an abbreviation: Software Synths December 2009. An album explicitly named for its tools — the software synthesizers Colin was using. This is the most self-referential release in the album-a-month catalog: the name is not a concept or a feeling but a production method.
8 tracks with a more abstract naming style than DEC09SCIFI: open, cute helmet, flying, feet spots, wink practice, tuff helmet, fiction science, close. The album structure is visible in the titles — open begins it and close ends it, a formal gesture toward the album as a unified arc.
“cute helmet” and “tuff helmet” are a pair — two helmets at different registers (tender vs. hard), like a call and response. “wink practice” implies repetition, rehearsal, a gesture being learned. “fiction science” inverts “science fiction” — putting the fiction first, the science secondary.
Two December 2009 albums in the same month — DEC09SCIFI and SFTWRSYNTHZdec09 — may represent two different modes Colin was working in simultaneously: the themed concept album (sci-fi) and the tool-specific abstract album (software synths).
Track Listing
- open
- cute helmet
- flying
- feet spots
- wink practice
- tuff helmet
- fiction science
- close
(Track 03 missing from archive.)
Archive Notes
- Second December 2009 release; Colin hit his “album a month” goal by releasing two in December
- Title abbreviation style — “SFTWR” / “SYNTHS” — echoes the compressed naming visible in sftwre synths float tense on the prior month’s octobrr09, suggesting the full December title was already being abbreviated in November
- Track 03 missing from the archive
- Structural tracks: “open” (track 01) and “close” (track 09) frame the album explicitly
Archive: _Documentation/Music/alphabets/SFTWRSYNTHZdec09