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Amidst living a new life halfway across the world from where i'm used to, how close can i come to meeting the Rule of 40 by starting half a month late, writing songs as fast as i can whenever i can find time, and then just recording them live with no post-production on my phone?

Only the next 9 days can tell ...

Well, apparently the answer to the question above is about 28 minutes short.  :D

This year was difficult for me, but i still had some fun with it.  There were a lot of factors that affected my time, energy, and (to be honest) inspiration to create this year.  I was excited about the _idea_ of this, our 10th year of the annual InCoAlMo challenge, but i felt like i had some blocks and setbacks from feeling jazzed about the musical possibilities that i had in mind.

That said, as the month went on and i couldn't seem to get any of my ideas to take root, i tried to really just embrace the core underlying idea behind InCoAlMo in general (and The Rule Of 0 in particular): creating something is better than creating nothing.  That's when i finally gave things a go, and after getting a couple of songs underway, finally officially registered for the challenge.

Process-wise, just focusing on writing, playing, and super-simple recording was a nice change; it really let me engage more with the most-fun parts of the process.  It meant really limiting my instrumentation, layering (none), and post-production (almost none), but made the whole endeavor much less daunting.  That said, it did pose the problem of really having to be able to perform the music live; there was no option to overdub, comp, or make complex edits.  This was really the single biggest challenge to production, especially on the somewhat-complicated instrumental track (which, because i wanted a metronome, actually required _two_ phones (as did the album cover)).

All told, i'm pretty happy with the product (under-12-minute runtime notwithstanding).  I wrote a couple of neat little tunes, had fun with them, and got to throw another drop of music into the ocean to add to the background radiation of the universe.  It's also got me thinking about how i might try to leverage this type of creative freedom on future projects.

Thanks to all my fellow InCoAlMo artists who helped inspire me — especially this year — to keep it Real.

Album title look familiar?  It should, because my primary goal for InCoAlMo this year is to finish last year's record.  :D

My InCoAlMo 2023 album was mostly done on time, but needed a couple more songs to fully realize its intention and meet all of the challenge Rules.  (The full story can be found in my Post-Game from last year.)

Of course, this means that this entry will be an automatic PARTIAL (at best) for this year, but given everything that i have going on in my life this spring, that's maybe okay.  :)

For easy reference, the album's concept, as written last year, is the same, and reads as follows:

"No matter how fervently we seek the light, there are always remnants of our journey, forgotten and unchecked in the shadows.

Before they can be let go, they need illumination."

Sadly, i didn't get very much done on finishing this project.  My other entry for 2024, "The Last Total Eclipse", was lightweight (as it was designed to be), but still took priority because of it's one-recording-a-day nature.  I was hoping that, beyond that, i'd still have time to finish the last couple of songs for "Shadow Work", but there were just too many distractions this year.

The little bit of progress i made was some continued writing on one of the two final songs, "Red Moon", which is coming along nicely.  The last track (both to be written and to close the album), "Die Trying", has yet to be started (beyond the overall concept and a few lyrics fragments).

I will probably go back to the original Plan B (since Plan A was actually finishing this album in March of 2023) and try to finish this record later in the year for release whenever it's done.

In roughly 600 million years, lunar tidal acceleration will render one final moment when the moon is still close enough to the earth to completely eclipse the sun.

Driven by a semi-improvisational engine of very short recordings and randomized words, this spoken-word experiment seeks to capture the journey of a creature wrought solely for the purpose of observing that moment.

I'm happy to report that this record did actually get done!  My approach, designed to keep things simple and lighter-weight this year, worked out pretty well.

My process went something like this:

0)  I came up with my production concept: record one spoken-word track each day of March, largely improvised, to create a 31-track album.  So long as the average track ran more than 78 seconds, i would successfully meet the Rule of 40.

1)  Prior to March, i did a little research on my album concept and prepped and outline.  I decided that, for every track except the first ("Realization") and last ("Redemption"), i would use a randomly selected word (https://randomwordgenerator.com/) within the track text, and as its general subject and its title.  I drew 29 random words (one for each day in March other than the first and last).  Using the words in the order they were drawn, i started mentally outlining a rough story that would move the protagonist through different stages of the adventure.

2)  Each day in March, i quickly put together a few paragraphs of copy for the day's track.  I did this by taking a look at the outline, quickly skimming the previous day's copy, and then (often with speech-to-text) dropping a draft into my Notes app.  I then made a fast pass of edits, and recorded the copy using my Voice Memo app.  Editing was done right in the app and kept very minimal: just trimming front and end space and pauses/noises from recording between paragraphs.  On most days, the whole process took maybe 30-45 minutes.  With only a few exceptions, i managed to keep pace by getting one track done each day.

3)  On the last night of March, after getting the final few tracks recorded, i dropped them all into GarageBand, spaced them out, added dynamics control and EQ, and automated out a few spurious noises that popped through the gating.  I also added and mixed in the Super Secret Bonus Feature: a background ambient synth drone track by KC2, which he cooked up for me alongside finishing his own full-length album this year!!

At this point — written, recorded, edited, and mixed — i called the album "done". ... but there were a few catches.  First, due to some technical issues (and my limited availability in the final days of March), the audio for KC2's track had some unintended errors in it; the result was still listenable, but it wasn't really what he had composed.  Second, in the midst of trying to put all that together in the last night of March (after losing a few full days to travel), i ran past midnight by about 4 hours.

All that said, i'm still calling this album a WINNER for this year.  I'm invoking the Rule of 0 because of the lost days, the fact that KC2's work was a bonus feature not in the original plan, and the fact that i only went over a few hours.  Given the technical issues, i've decided to replace KC2's drone with the corrected version and release the album in its intended form.  All in all, i feel that this final product falls successfully within the spirit of the challenge.

So, given my invocation of the Rule of 0, i'm otherwise compliant: album runtime is over 54 minutes (Rule of 40) and all new/original material (Rules of 30, 20, and 10).

As for my experience, this album was a fun and relatively easy project to bang out — as intended (cuz i have a lot going on this year!).  The random-word-driven semi-improvized approach definitely got the juices flowing, and i feel like i ended up with a neat little cinematic story that people might enjoy.

No matter how fervently we seek the light, there are always remnants of our journey, forgotten and unchecked in the shadows.

Before they can be let go, they need illumination.

This year, i came very close to a strict win, but decided not to compromise the unfinished portion of the album just to make the deadline.  I felt that, in this case, i'd rather produce the album that i really wanted to make, even if it meant coming in late.

I did successfully complete recording and mixing for 10 songs that add up to over 39 minutes of music.  I'm generally happy with the writing and guitar parts, and mostly satisfied with the vocal performances — though, as always, there are things i wish i could've gotten better.

Despite this runtime being just about what i needed for the Rule Of 40, i leveraged more pre-written material on this record than i have on albums past (one full song as well as fragments of four others).  As i result, i technically needed ~7 more minutes of new material in order to meet the Rule Of 30.  I came up with specific ideas for how i wanted to fill those 7 minutes, but i couldn't realize them before time ran out.

Rather than just give up on those ideas and fill the time with a huge freestyle jam or something, i'm taking a "PARTIAL" this year so that i can stay true to the concept and vision i had for the album.  My hope is to complete the record in the months to come, and release a final mastered version.  As of now, i'm not planning to re-record or re-mix any of the 10 songs that are already completed, but focus only on composing and rendering the additional material to fill out the record.

On the whole, this year's challenge was fraught with some usual difficulties — including some health issues that complicated things — but i'm very glad i stuck with it and got as far as i did.  While part of me wishes i'd pushed harder earlier in the month and enabled the record to get fully completed, another part realizes that the songs i _did_ complete (some of which i really love) very likely needed that time to grow.  Much of the writing here definitely helped to affirm some of the emotions and catharses that inspired the album's concept, but (as one of the songs yet to be written will loudly declare) there is always more shadow work to be done.

[LINK TO FINAL ALBUM to be provided when available ...]

This year, i actually put my album concept up to a vote!  Folks who supported a crowdfunding campaign in which i was involved selected from a list of 8 nominees (some of which are pretty wacky, and almost all of which were submitted by one of them).

The winning concept, submitted by long-time supporter Jeff Elbel, read as follows:

"10 songs each somehow based upon, related to, influenced by, explaining, or spinning off from a character found in (artwork or lyrics from) one Rush album. The list of albums must include Rush, 2112, Moving Pictures, and Clockwork Angels."

The victory was by a narrow margin (1 vote of 22 cast plus 4 abstentions), with the runners up being tied between an album of songs about how other songs could've been better (submitted by Dave Morris) and a concept described simply as "Girls, Cars, and Surfing" (also submitted by Jeff Elbel).  Thanks also to Jason Larke for submitting a great concept nominee.

I was honestly on fence about whether i should call this year's record a WINNER or a PARTIAL, but because i didn't fully complete what i set out to do, i feel like it's more fair to fall back to the latter.

In terms of the challenge, i did successfully write and record the 10 songs as stipulated by Jeff Elbel's winning concept submission.  In terms of the created material, i successfully met the Rules of 40, 30, 20, and 10, as well, and did so by approximately 2152 EDT on 31 March, before the challenge deadline.

Unfortunately, just after the Equinox, my work was set back by (what is best described as) a very sudden death in the family, and the resulting hit to my production schedule wasn't fully recoverable.  While i was able to record my material on time and even get some rough mixes by ~0115 EDT on 01 April (which, given the EST-to-EDT conversion mid-month, is technically only 15 minutes late, for which i'd normally just call Rule of 0), i did not at all have time to correctly mix the album.  In the past, i've called albums "done" prior to being mastered, but they've always at least gotten to final (enough) mix.  This one definitely isn't final in that regard, so i can't call it really "done" until it's properly mixed.  I suppose one could claim that my rough-mix drop of the record is technically a complete "version" of the album, which is why i say i could theoretically call this a WINNER. ... but in the end, it doesn't really matter.

What matters is that -- despite a very difficult ending to the month -- i wrote and minimally rendered a record with which i'm very happy in terms of capturing my vision.  As usual, many performances could've been better and all that, but i'm extremely pleased with how the composition and writing turned out.  Jeff's concept was incredibly fun to work with, and inspired a wide variety of fun (at least for me) pieces, including some in genres that i might call sloppy jazz, early-70s rock, punkadilly, tribute filk, and pseudo-world minimalist trance-funk-scat.  As is often the case with my InCoAlMo records, i found the ideas and creative process inspired by the concept to be very rewarding, and feel that with more serious production, this could be an album i'd be very happy to promote.  I'm hoping that, since i can take more time with final mixing this year, i might get closer than ever to a "serious" final product (at the cost, of course, of my first-ever InCoAlMo without a WINNER on the record books).  Ç'est la vie.  :)

*** UPDATE 2024 ***

It took awhile, but i eventually decided that i really liked the material on this album, and that it'd be worth having it professionally mixed and mastered.  We worked this up for a release in early 2024, and i really ended up with a much better record than i could've hoped for on my own.  The full story is in the "liner notes" on Bandcamp (link above), but in short, i'm very happy and grateful for this record and for the unique challenge that inspired it!

For a few different reasons, i've decided this year to do a spoken-word retrospective sharing thoughts on the five InCoAlMo challenges that i've completed to date -- a "rockumentary podcast album", perhaps?  The plan is to record six pairs of 4-minute tracks.  For five of them, each pair will discuss the production of a previous year's challenge, with one track describing the album overall and another focusing on a selected piece from that album.  The last pair will be dedicated to the InCoAlMo concept itself, serving as sort of an "intro" and "conclusion" to the record.  There may be one or more uncounted bonus tracks, as well.  My hope is to deliberately avoid talking about things already covered in the "liner notes", so as to provide new insights into how the records were made, and what i've learned over the past 5 years.

This year's InCoAlMo record was actually pretty straightforward, which i guess isn't surprising given what it was.  The concept and process were both very straightforward, and the album execution pretty much went as expected.  The only real delay to final release was getting around to mastering the record, which also included selecting and prepping some "bonus tracks" which are included in the Bandcamp download (which is available at no cost).
That said, writing and recording this album was actually a little bit of a surprise in how much i enjoyed re-examining these past projects.  By the time i was done, some themes had surfaced that bore out how these InCoAlMo albums had progressed over time, leveraging some lessons learned along the way, but also remaining subject to both new and ongoing challenges imposed by the aggressive deadline.  In the end, while this retrospective may not prove terribly interesting to the average music listener, i think it might provide some neat insights to fellow InCoAlMo artists and/or to the rare hardcore fan of my own work who's actually listened to all these crazy records over the years.
One thing i can say is that taking this little retrospective journey has definitely gotten me looking forward to next year's challenge and to finding out what new experiences await!

In light of some recent events, i've been forced to update my concept and plan for JCAM this year.  Plans may be updated further, but as of now, i'm expecting to pursue a low-key process recording of mainly guitar and vocals, with many or most composition driven primarily by improvisation.  I'm not really sure exactly where i'm going with it, but in this case, that's part of the point.  I'm going to let this be a very process- and heart-led experiment.

The best summary of how this year's challenge went may well be in the "liner notes" posted at the album link above, but it may suffice to say that this was in various ways both my most inspired and most challenging JoCoAlbMo project yet.  The original working title, The Requiem Sessions, sought to capture my production approach: to fill the canvas of the album with pieces -- or possibly even one long piece -- derived largely from improvisation.  For the most part, this approach was adhered to.  I captured musical ideas on a simple voice-memo app as ideas and jams came to me; i discarded some and developed others as the month went on.  For production recording, i actually recorded the entire album into one long piece, using only a few tracks to delineate vocals from acoustic guitar from electric.  As the album filled out, i rearranged the pieces in the editor and used automation (where necessary) and occasional comp-track approaches to mix (since the pieces were not each their own mix).  This overall approach worked well given my plan to stay within the realm of guitars and vocals, and in the end, helped me spend less time on production.  The all-original album used nothing pre-written, so the Rules of 40, 30, 20, and 10 were adhered to.  While the subject matter was emotionally difficult to get through, i believe the combination of powerful inspiration and bare-bones production resulted in a very heartfelt and authentic record -- and perhaps my most approachable JoCoAlbMo project.  I'm very grateful.  (More details on the day-to-day progress of production can be found on my Twitter (twitter.com/josephmancuso), for anyone interested.)

After long deliberation, i decided to go light-hearted this year: an album of tracks each inspired by a classic and/or memorable video game from my youth.  For some, i plan to use metaphor or narrowed focus to make the track content more like a "normal" song, perhaps even obfuscating the game itself.  (I look forward to having fun with how that turns out.)  In terms of production and accessibility, i think i'd like to continue to push the envelope from last year's challenge and move another step closer to a professional-sounding record.  For me, this likely means simplifying my instrumentation, so this year's focus may lean heavily toward my over-two-decade-old songwriting roots of just vocals and acoustic guitar with minimal additional instruments.

Overall, i'm fairly proud of the results of this year's challenge.  As has often been the case, i was very pleased with the songwriting/compostion side of the album from the creative standpoint.  Not only did i meet my goal of writing songs about the games i selected, i also worked a few puzzles into the album to make it (sorta) a game itself!  As has always been the case, there were some production compromises that limit the album's accessibility as a traditional pop/rock record.  As i had set out to do, i did successfully bring up the overall recording quality relative to previous years' albums.  However (as expected), doing this required that i severely limit my instrumentation.  This meant that, instead of last year's album of fully instrumented songs with obvious quality issues, i had decent-quality songs that likely sound "unfinished" to most listeners.  On the whole, though, i consider this a win, as i was able to accomplish my goals as prioritized fully within the parameters of the challenge (with, in fact, nothing pre-written or pre-recorded other than a few samples used on one track).

In the past two years of JoCoAlbMo, i've done both a highly structured album with a strong personal theme and a ridiculously experimental algorithm piece that should probably not be taken seriously.  This year, i'd like to aim for the middle of the road: an honestly musical endeavor with an eye toward accessibility and quality but built on a foundation of improvisation and a core concept of the importance of letting go.

2018's JoCoAlbMo challenge was a nice breakthrough for me.  As i originally hoped, i successfully composed an album of songs that were fairly well-written and generally accessible, despite the usual limitations of performance and production that come along with the 31-day timeline (and my usual heavy non-musical commitments).  In addition, i got an album of somewhat diverse material, which is something i often look for in a record.
What surprised me was how my concept shifted almost immediately.  I had originally hoped that "Let Go Harder" would embody the idea implied by its title, and be a largely "off-the-cuff" work (per original concept).  However, as i started working on the material, a more concrete conceptual sequence started to emerge: the message of the importance of "letting go" in art, the despair with which we struggle when looking at the world, and the idea that "letting go" in that larger context can help one view the world as art (and therein find hope).  This set of ideas ran away with the album, and is represented in the flow of songs on the record.  While this shift forced me to push harder to get the record done (and therefore make more production sacrifices than i'd hoped), i consider it a net win, as the final product embodies a great message that i feel the original concept would not have.  Much like "An Ocean" (my first JoCoAlbMo record, 2016), i feel like this record is a great "final draft" for what could be a really great album were it remade with professional production (and, in contrast to "An Ocean", it would be both an easier and far more accessible upgrade).
As usual, i tried hard to meet all the challenge Rules.  The album came in just over 50 minutes (Rule of 40), including a 4.5-minute cover (Rule of 10).  Only the bassline of "Monkeys!" was pre-recorded (Rule of 20) -- a sample taken from last year's 4EARMe record.  Aside from the cover and that bassline, only the lyrics and melody for the choruses of "Indigo" had been written in advance (Rule of 30).  I did, however, make use of the shift to Daylight Savings Time to buy myself an extra hour, and needed to invoke the Rule of 0 to cover a little extra time, as the album's final mix went to disk at ~0113 DST on 01 April.  I'm calling that close enough.

we were given an image of music,
and we believed.

For me, JoCoAlbMo did exactly what it was supposed to.  From a production standpoint, the album is honestly weak, but letting go of that priority freed me up tremendously, and it resulted in an album of which i'm very proud in terms of creative content.  Thanks to many supportive folks, i was able to complete this album before the end of March, and kept it all within the JoCoAlbMo Rules of 40, 30, 20 and 10.  I'm already cooking up some ideas for next year ...