In November 1994, the Tinty Music CD (Weightlessness: Of Contemplation and Distraction) that had been so many months in the making was finally done. The end result wasn’t exactly what I had envisioned when I started the project, but it was something that I felt good about putting out into the world.

It ended up being the most widely distributed of the recordings I released, even if it did end up being only a couple hundred copies, give or take. It also got very good reviews, for the most part; even Option magazine had some good things to say about it.

Perhaps the most significant thing about Weightlessness was that it got me interested in graphic design—even if only because (at first) I wanted to have more control over how my projects looked. After seeing that the folks who did the original cover for me were using Aldus Pagemaker, I went out and bought a used copy; I used it for all of my projects after that.

In 2004, I decided to create a new edition as my year-end holiday gift to friends and family. I came up with new artwork that managed to evoke the original design yet be more in tune with both my own tastes and the music it was representing. I did battle with my CD burning software (eventually switching to the more stable Nero), using well over 175 discs in order to have 125 good copies (I included an extra disc with the first 25 copies). I had the booklets printed elsewhere (I would have gone through a lot of ink otherwise), but I printed all the disc labels (using inkjet-printable discs) myself. And I have been able to stick with my original plan of only giving away copies instead of selling them—to date, I have distributed 69 of the 100 copies I produced.

After finishing the Short Forms 1989–2004 compilation last month, I was motivated to do more. I went back to that 2004 ’10th Anniversary Edition’ of Weightlessness, created a PDF booklet to go along with it (slightly updating that edition’s cover art in the process), and uploaded the music from that two-disc edition to Bandcamp.

A day or two after that, I re-discovered the ‘Excerpts from Weightlessness: Of Contemplation and Distraction‘ track that the folks at Artist Direct had compiled for their first (and only) artist sampler CD, which I’d somehow managed to forget about. It was something they had put together on their own, without asking—but I thought they actually did a good job with it, so I had no objections. I decided to add it to the Bandcamp album, making it the preview track (although I decided against revising the PDF yet again).

(30 March 2014)