About a decade ago I made a number of heavy metal recordings under the name of Caligula (in retrospect I am curious why so many of us felt and feel compelled to make an intentionally and overtly evil kind of music). I released two of them, Rust I and II, as an EP in 2015, and it received a couple of positive reviews. However, I never got round to releasing any of the other tracks. There were ten finished recordings in total, plus a handful more half-finished recordings that will remain forever so. I had intended to record an album, but by this time I became almost totally disenchanted with music after so much exhausting nonsense playing in bands. When I was sixteen or so I tried to regain musica control by learning how to record music at home and also how to programme drums. For a few months I pursued it intensely, but eventually I found that (for me) the styles of music in which I was immersed were dead ends. A few years later I discovered, almost miraculously, the music of Charles Ives, and that opened my ears and my mind to a soundworld that was — so obviously — what I was looking for all along. A couple of years after that I began studying the classical guitar and became, and remain, thoroughly re-enchanted with music.

Still, these metal recordings were early attempts to find meaning in music, and revisiting them recently, I feel no small amount of affection for them. CDBaby recently had a sale which meant I could distribute an album for only $4.99, which is ridiculously cheap, so I thought I might as well finally put this out there: