Electronic Musician
My recent focus has been turning short demos into finished tracks. Three groups have risen to the top after three straight years of doing a sketch a day each January — part of the global artist challenge called Jamuary. The recordings are short, about a minute each. I have found the commitment transformative: the system pushed me, and I developed a deeper connection with the music inside myself. Countless more demos are waiting, and they will get the attention they deserve. I’m grateful a few interesting avenues for vinyl and digital releases are taking shape. Digitally, I’ll be concentrating on Bandcamp as the main outlet.
4 tracks each — GR1.1 through GR3.4 — presented as demos. These are working takes, not masters. Sound is muted until you toggle the play button.
It started on a front porch in Merville, Vancouver Island, BC Canada. I was six, with a shortwave radio, turning the dial. The stations mattered less than the wild other-worldly spaces between them.
By my teens I was collecting Experimental, Noise and Industrial records. I started a project called Sect and signed to Spiral Records in Vancouver while I was still in high school. Bruce Young and Jason McEvoy joined around the time Electronic music entered into its Renaissance. Sect’s sound bolted Techno onto its Industrial frame. Third Mind put out Telekinetic in 1994. Subduction picked us up after that, and I explored two paths in parallel: Ambient Techno, and Tech House. I saved the Tech House for further development and let a few of the armchair Techno tracks out on various compilations. Many more rough mixes have recently been pulled from DATs thanks to friend and fellow Tech House enjoyer/producer and DJ, Flørist (Pavilion Records).
Then I stopped for a few years to navigate some tricky waters.
In 2001 I shed the aliases and released under my own name: Michael Victory. I self released Deep Architecture, then in 2002 CSM put out the Winds of Change vinyl single.
2017 changed how I work. I made a long Ambient album for one reason: the format let me actually finish it, and I needed an on-ramp. That was informative; pick a subgenre I love that requires less and get on with it.
Now it is time to get back to the more energetic work I began in the late 1990s with Deep Architecture and the cassette jams that came before. The aesthetic fits me and the no fuss, no ceremony aspect of the style feels right.
You get the records. You also get the patch map for each one — the exact routing, drawn like a transit diagram, so you can see how it was built. Etched metal plates of those patches go to this list first.