UPDATE: I will add little notes to this post as I head further down the rabbit hole of post-production and editing, mastering, and yes... Even the artwork phase of this EP. Keep coming back to this page for more updates! They are dated below:
08.28.2022 // Sunday
I don't think the EP will make it by my birthday, but I am working on bits and pieces of it every single day. This week, I am on post-production editing duties, song running order, and other odd things. Shall I tell you about such things? Or will they simply verify that yours truly is quite insane?
Well, for what it is worth, I take the song order as seriously as the mixing, mastering, art, etc. In my world, this is symbiotic to my many pursuits of being a 'creative'. The reason I take it to heart is that it is the song order that will sometimes dictate what transitions will be added or deleted in the process. In fact, I could state without a shadow of a doubt that the running order of an album or even an EP could change the fundamental experience of the listener as well as the way the art interacts with the audio. In my opinion, this is why I loathe pop albums with the artist on the cover. It adds nothing to the equation with few exceptions (Bowie comes to mind).
Today I got my order done, and it took an entire day to just get this far. In the process, three instrumental pieces were assembled, discarded, re-cut, and mixed. Perhaps no one will care about this but me. That's alright. I have to make this one for me too. I hope.
08.29.2022 // Monday
I worked on the art, painting well into last night before I went to bed. These snippets are part of quite a complex piece... I think it may be as important to my history as it puts everything I've been accumulating into some sort of catharsis. I can feel it. Today, I digitally worked on the physical pieces and it was such fun, and yet I kept doubting myself at every turn of the clock. But I pushed through.
I even awoke with what was to happen next. It was as if I had had a conversation with a different version of myself, in the early morning hours, in some alternate copy of this world, and he informed me of what was next for this EP. I just took notes. Then I got to work. That's where we are at the moment.
If you are following me on Twitter, I have been posting snippets and whatnot. I hope you like them. But just in case you are not following me there, I've added most of them to this post.
09.03.2022 // Saturday
So, this morning I woke up in a bit of a mood. I worked on the running order, yet again, convinced that there was no way the previous one was to be beaten. But I was dead wrong. And I owe it all to the stream. For whatever reason, this morning during my coffee I was thinking about a cassette version, and some other 'secret bits' about this EP, and I jotted down the running order of the demos as they came to me. As I stared at the list, I was surprised, if not shocked. This was not any running order I'd had. So rather than chaulking it up to random memory, I decided to put a playlist together in Ableton and run the tracks with their transitions and such. And there it was. IT. The whole thing. 
Here's the OCDness of my proof. I had to completely re-edit two instrumentals to make it work, and I did it. I had to find a long note full of distortion and add it to a song, and I did it. I had to record some bits of audio for the Spotify version (it will differ a bit from the one you can own), and I did it. Rather exhausted after all of this I felt mentally off. Was I adding to the workload for this mini album as some sort of avoidance? How could this be avoidance to create if I just did more work? Believe me, I went there too. But I have to tell you, it really did work. All of it. It felt correct. As if this is how it should have been from the beginning.
But there is a challenge. Just as much as I love this running order, the artwork, etc... It is the title of the whole thing that's bugging me now. I'm not sure I'm going to call it, Abandoned Works A at this point. It's not fair to these songs. Even though I know it is a play on words as well as an inkling of truth to say these songs were held off forever from the recording studio, it isn't fair to call them 'abandoned' as it makes it seem the recordings themselves are old. Not now. They've fought too hard to be nostalgic (pun intended) and new. I fought for this one hard. I bled. I had to go back to dark periods and even face myself in ways I thought were past me.
So now I need a title that reflects the past and the present. I have this drawing of a book I wanted to put together someday of the NFT art and it was going to be called, Nobody Feared Television. That one is on my list, and it fits. Whatever the title is, it will be an acronym for NFT. Maybe by the next update??
09.07.2022 // Wednesday
I've been with a Migraine (happy birthday to me on Tuesday it said), so this update comes in a little late. But, I officially finished the last bits of recording and I'm heading for the mastering stages on the day before my birthday. So I can say without lying that the EP itself was all recorded and mixed by my birthday. The working title is now...
Anything Box
Notably Fractured Times
And it comes after about four days of writing and figuring it all out. I gave up on my original title because there is a reason to use it at a later date. But this title fits the artwork and the songs really well. It says today and yesterday. It's a title that speaks for my state of mind when these songs were written as well as when they were finally set down.
Might this change before release? I doubt it. It fits really well thus far, and it informed a bit of the running order, which will make crazy sense for the fans (I hope). All I can do is roll with it. The artwork is not all done either, as I have to put together a PDF for the lyrics, set up the NFTs, the prints, etc. It's quite a bit of work. But at least I can take off a hat to don another. This week is slow to start, but that EP is on my mind 24/7 now. It needs to get out.