New Digital Album Available- "Solo for Fake Fireplace" by Peter J. Woods

Hey everyone! Happy Friday! I dropped a new album today (which you can stream above). If you want to know more, here is some writing about the album:

I have found that creating new work in the middle of a pandemic has been a lot harder than I thought. Creative energy has been fleeting at best, especially in the past few months and in relation to making music. To try to get myself out of this rut, I've been doing what I usually do: forcing myself to manifest whatever ridiculous ideas I come up with and hoping that builds momentum for other projects.

With that said, I'm excited to share my latest album with you. "Solo for Fake Fireplace" is a single 55 minute slab of harsh noise, crafted entirely out of (varyingly distorted) sounds generated by the fake fireplace I have in my house. Compositionally, the work aligns ideologically with the harsh noise wall subgenre, even if the aesthetics of the release do not necessarily do so. In other words, brace yourself for some slow and subtle changes in a crackling static.

Although this piece definitely falls in the "just sit down and make something for the sake of making something" category, it also represents the first step in a new direction for my solo work. On my next "proper" full length (hopefully coming Spring/Summer of 2021), I spent a lot of time thinking about ideas of posthumanism, how we as individuals are defined by the technologies and ecologies around us (to the point where the idea of an "individual" is almost meaningless). In doing so, I thought a lot about the instruments I use to create my work: the candle holders I got at a flea market 8 years ago, the piece of sheet metal Jeff Witscher left in my basement in 2008, the viola I've had since 8th grade, etc. Through these reflections, I came up with the idea of creating works that highlight these instruments and the various techniques I've developed over the decades of playing them. Rather than shaping them into a composition/performance defined by an extrinsic theme or concept, I want that composition to come from the instrument itself. To this end, I'm planning on spending the next year or two creating work dedicated to this approach, improvising and composing pieces for single instruments that organically grow from the object itself. And even though I've never played my fireplace before and I don't intend on distorting everything to high heaven, this album serves as a sort of proof of concept for this new endeavor.

Will this produce good music? Who knows. But it's worth a shot. And I also may abandon this idea as soon as I can play shows again. Either way, it's in writing now so I can't change my mind now (at least for a bit).

Hope to have more for you soon!