By this point in my journey, I’d self-produced two albums. While those words in that order are true, they do give the wrong impression that I’m some sort of Peter Gabriel churning out music in my multi-million dollar studio and selling copies by the hundreds of thousands. Close, but not quite.

The first album (Eclipse, 1987) was nothing more than a brain dump. I carried a boombox into the university’s music room basement, placed it on a practice piano, and recorded everything my head was holding in at the time. Later, in my tiny-but-growing home studio apartment, I finished my second album (Interactions, 1989).

A couple of years after that, I moved onto my third major project. But it wasn’t under the Continuum name. Nope, Laura and I were getting married and I wanted to write most of the music for the ceremony. Since this music would most definitely reach the ears of more than three people, I spent more time on the production quality. It still wasn’t perfect, but the project did come with a pretty hard deadline. The following track contains a series of seven excerpts (you should be able to pick them out in the wave form display) from the near one-hour of music I wrote and recorded for it:

From that point, I expected I’d just keep going and improving. I knew without a doubt I was still miles from reaching my full potential, both in production quality and musical execution. I no longer wanted to just “dabble.” I wanted to practice more, procure more better equipment, and ultimately produce something I would proudly foist upon my fellow earthlings.

Instead, the majority of what I recorded during the next period went like this: turn on the drum machine, loop a bass line, and then play a solo synth part over the top. And then do this for many, many minutes on end. These tracks aren’t songs, per se. More like experimentation with the intention that something would eventually come of it. But nothing ever did.

By the time the third Continuum album was “supposed” to come out (meeting a purely arbitrary schedule in my head) I realized all I had were hours and hours of these test recordings. So I punted and released Continuum 2.9: Sketches. And when even more time passed and it felt like it was high time for yet another release, out came Sketches: Volume 2. Here’s a 10-track sampler of music from this era:

So what happened? Well, life happened. A wife, two kids, a house, and a job. Two jobs, actually, since we started a video production company. Worst of all? It was around this time that I got the idea I could be a novelist. And we all know how that turned out.

For Christmas 1997, I assembled a “multimedia fun pack” as a present for my dad. I decided to put together some audio, video, and print that represented my best work. The music portion ended up being a series of cassettes called Continuum: Decade. It was half “greatest hits” and half “never before released tracks” and it was all good. We had no idea at the time it would be his last Christmas, so I’m grateful that I did this when I did.

What’s odd to me today is that in 1997 I believed that “ten years” was a long period of time. There were times where I would begin a recording by saying, “It’s me again. I know it’s been a long time…” when in reality only three months had passed since the last one. Sheesh. I’m at the point in my life now where it takes me three months just to pick out my dinner selection from a ten-page menu.

I’ll throw in two more tracks, which stand out a bit more from the above work. At one point, I wanted to record some Christmas music. This is as far as I got:

And this track from 1994, named October, almost signaled a return to this stuff. But like everything else, things fell apart soon after and I never even finished just one song, let alone a whole album’s worth:

Tune in next week for the exciting conclusion of this exciting series!