Bandcamp Friday: March 7, 2025

New release: Semiautonomous Etudes

Author

Dave Seidel
March 05, 2025

Hi everybody. I have just put up a new (pre-)release called Semiautonomous Etudes. It will release in full this Friday, March 7, which happens to be the next Bandcamp Friday. If you don’t already know, Bandcamp Friday is a 24-hour period during which the full proceeds of all sales go to the artist, without Bandcamp taking their usual cut.

Semiautonomous Etudes is a bit of a departure for me, somewhat in a similar vein to Music For Black Sine Wave in the sense that it is more noisy and chaotic than my usual just intonation drones, but it is otherwise very different from MFBSW. I hope you will give it a listen. Although I am certainly not abandoning my primary style, there is likely to be more in this vein coming in the future, including music that combines both pitched and unpitched sound.

Here’s the link: https://mysterybear.bandcamp.com/album/semiautonomous-etudes, and here’s the first paragraph of the liner notes:

This album derives from a series of daily recording sessions made in February 2025. I had recently acquired two Ciat-Lonbard devices, the Clicker and the Peterlin, and was exploring them in conjunction with several pedals. As I often do, I sought to discover the idiomatic sounds and behaviors of these devices, without a preexisting compositional agenda or theoretical framework. They are noisy and unruly by nature, untethered to notions such as precise pitch. The chaotic and aggressive sounds that resulted are appropriate in the light of the current political situation in the US in 2025, where the country is being plundered and savaged by a lawless coterie of scoundrels and oligarchs.

(I don’t usually mention politics in relation to my music, and I didn’t make this with politics consciously in mind, but the situation here in the US is pretty dire, and not something that I can remain completely silent about.)

Anyway, I would like to offer some free download codes, of course on a first-come-first-serve basis. To redeem on of these codes, visit https://mysterybear.bandcamp.com/yum and enter the code.

  • 8g5j-xpjp

  • 22r8-e282

  • xnl2-yaje

  • h5p5-7783

  • q79b-vju4

  • fl2l-gyam

  • lsmq-uuug

  • ejr6-5qmu

  • gbx2-bt8p

  • 3dca-xn7n

That’s it for now. Please stay safe and take care of yourselves and your community.

Thanks,
Dave

PS — There will be a Listening Party for this release on Sunday March 9 at 3pm EDT. For more info, visit https://mysterybear.bandcamp.com/merch/semiautonomous-etudes-listening-party