New Authorities (2022, formerly "E.W.S.")

New Authorities is the first real music project I made. It was recorded in 2022, when I was 16. I was already very interested in tapes, but I still had very little knowledge of what I was doing. That is part of the record's character.

It is a collage album, though not in a clean or heavily layered way. Much of the source material came from early demos and small recordings, which were pushed through samplers and tape manipulation until the original material disappeared. Sometimes there are only one or two layers. The density is not really the point. What matters is that nothing sits still. The material keeps bending, slipping, breaking, and then continuing. It feels like one unstable mass in motion.

The album still feels dystopian to me, but not in a worldbuilding or concept-album sense. It is more in the behavior of the sound. Things are damaged, half-formed, unstable, held together while also falling apart. The album is not really driven by beats or normal harmony. It is mostly texture, tape edits, sampler damage, noise, and the microtonal synths that keep returning through the release.

New Authorities - Part 2 was the first track made for the project, and it already contains most of the record's language: destroyed sounds, tape edits, sampler abuse, and synths that feel almost normal but not quite. E.W.S. - Part 2 is one of the clearest moments on the album. It is extremely simple, almost just one synth buried under noise, but the chromatic movement in 31-EDO gives it a strange beauty without making the tuning feel like the subject.

The whole thing was recorded straight to cassette. At the time I used separate tapes for separate tracks, and later compiled things onto another cassette. There are no original digital masters. There is only the tape rip. I do not really remember which sampler or samplers I used. The tape decks were cheap second-hand ones I had around, and I am fairly sure the project went through more than one of them. I do not own any of those decks anymore. The tapes were also random second-hand tapes, different brands, different types, whatever I had.

For the 2025 digital release I only changed the order and the volume. Some tracks were much quieter than others, so I leveled them a bit to make the album work as one thing. That also makes the tape noise louder in places. The hiss gives the record more body, but the rip is obviously damaged. The highs are dull, and the whole thing sounds worse than the original version did. That original version is gone unless it turns up somewhere. This cassette was probably already a dub of a dub, and it had been sitting in a damp shed for years. I found it by accident, and it was not labeled.

The album was originally called E.W.S.. I no longer know what that was supposed to stand for. In 2025 I gave it a new title and a new cover. New Authorities works for me because of the sound, the typography, and the kind of image it suggests. It does not have one clear meaning, and it does not explain the record. The current cover is a photo of my own face.

There was also a third cassette project from the same period, next to E.W.S. and Torn From Static, which later became 2-FDCK Angel. That third one was called Time Starts Now!. As far as I know it is gone. I still hope I find the cassette someday, and if I do I would probably release it. I do have a phone recording from 2022, but it is unusable. I had just recorded the tape playing through speakers with my phone. At the time I did not see the value in this material the way I do now, so I was much less careful with it.

New Authorities also used to have more tracks. Before everything was compiled onto one cassette, I lost a tape with two pieces on it. That is why there is no New Authorities - Part 6. I kept the missing number for the digital release because it felt right. It is partly a reminder of how chaotic the project was, and partly just a joke I wanted to keep.

The next project after this was 2-FDCK Angel. That one has a different sound, but they still belong together. They come from the same short period, and they both have that private, rough, not-quite-controlled feeling. I have been getting interested again in returning to this kind of unstable collage style, but it is harder now. A lot of what made it possible was genuine inexperience. That also made me freer. I was more willing to destroy things, make bad technical decisions, and follow something just because it felt right.

Below you can find alternative artwork, alternative covers, the original covers from when the project was still called E.W.S., and the raw cassette rip.

Text written in May 2026.