Resistance Foundation Take II
“If none will stand
And none will fight
This crucible
A liquid night”
Another album from the archives getting the "George Lucas" treatment before its first streaming distribution. As with No Hollow Wave I basically started over with an entirely new mix based on the existing material. Here's the rationale from the downloadable booklet:
“2017 is a year that felt like a reckoning—it turned out to be a mere prelude.
Four of the five songs included on this short album were written and recorded as a gut reaction to the political earthquake that followed the 2016 US elections. The fifth one (Fifty-Three Days) was created while re-working the original album lineup: I was already immersed in the themes, watching the formation of new, even deeper schisms. As such, even eight years later, the impulse is the same. Resistance. Foundation—astonishingly—rings even truer to me today than it did back then.
This is an entirely new mix: I started over without even listening to the previous version. New tracks were added, new parts recorded, each song was treated like any other current work in progress. On An Escape into the Corollary I removed words; on Foundation I added vocals. Drums were changed on Aquarians, and Sirius. Bass tracks, too. Tons more, everywhere. Nothing was treated as sacrosanct or out of bounds.
Is this version better than the original release? Maybe, maybe not.
It is, however, definitive.”
I ask myself a single question before diving back into any past project: is it relevant? The answer with this one was, unfortunately, all too clear.
One major change some of you (long-time readers) may notice: Horse Machines. The previous version had been released under Jade Leary, but I didn't want to launch another artist profile on streaming platforms, with all the approvals and overhead this entails. Besides, I think Resistance fits in better with these other albums—the global direction of the Horse Machines project initially grew out of experimentations on this particular EP. It was, in a way, its blueprint.
Resistance Foundation is dropping on Tuesday, April 29th (on most major streaming platforms), and you can pre-order it for Apple Music or Spotify by using this link (it'll automatically be added to your music library as soon as it's available).
My entire catalog will also be migrating to a new Canadian distributor (based in Montreal). It’s another small act of resistance (à propos), but it also comes with a technical upside: the music will no longer be forced to be 16-bit 44.1 kHz files (a requirement from my previous distributor). Whatever we think about audio it's always best to avoid downgrading source recordings in any way, and simply moving from 24-bit to 16-bit requires choosing the right dithering algorithm, which can introduce artifacts etc. In 2025, that's completely unnecessary. It also means that TAR will now be available in Hi-Res Lossless (24-bit 96 kHz), as it was initially recorded. (1)
This is not an anti-American crusade btw: I want to be very clear that I stand with all US citizens who are decrying the policies of their government. It's unfortunate that our only "power" resides in avoiding American products and services as much as possible—we all know too well how this is likely to impact individuals and businesses who are not at fault, and who may in fact share our views.
But we can't just stand by passively.
A quick anecdote: our youngest daughter spent three days in Boston on a school trip a couple of weeks ago (this had obviously been booked long before Trump took office). She loved it, and there were no incidents. They even met a waitress whose family originally came from Quebec (just like Jack Kerouac's and so many others). But when we asked her about the border crossing she mentioned how agents had interrogated everyone (ok, I guess), and then shot very close-up pictures of every student and teacher's eyes. No border agent, in any country, has ever taken a record of my eyes, and these were 15 year-old Canadian kids on a school bus. Nothing is normal anymore.
Resistance Foundation will also be available to download right here—and it'll be a freebie, with digital booklets in both PDF and EPUB.
As for that 2025 track? Here's a preview in case you're curious (it's in three parts so let it play awhile...!)
1: FYI: I'd love to offer album downloads as Apple Lossless but the resulting files bust Squarespace's size limit.
