Simon
MacHale

​​“It’s too late, I’ve missed my chance, I’m too old now”. These are the kind of phrases that have haunted me for years in relation to ‘releasing’ my music. I have never really had a problem with creating songs, writing and recording them. However, releasing them and getting them ‘out there’ has never been easy for me. I mainly wrote songs for myself, as a type of therapy, to process events in my life, and most of them were recorded at home with limited equipment. The thought of ‘finishing’ and sharing the music often filled me with a sense of heaviness, unlike the writing and recording which was always a pleasure. 

 

In early 2019, the penny slowly dropped for me in terms of reimagining the entire process I have been engaged in: What if my ‘demos’ were not ‘on the way towards something’ but rather that they were the ‘thing’? I slowly began to trawl through twenty years worth of ‘demos’, many of which were buried on old hard drives, data disks, etc. I asked myself: what if I could organise them chronologically ‘as if’ they had been released over that two-decade period, and present in one crazy moment all the albums I had never put out? And so I set to work assembling each album and giving it a retrospective title that tried to reflect the place I was at (either physically or emotionally) at the time the songs were written and recorded. My working principle was to preserve as much of the original recordings as possible, while allowing myself to chop things up, overlay and combine different versions of the same song, and add parts to make the recordings as full and presentable as possible.

And now in 2024, after hundreds of hours of editing, adding parts, mixing, and mastering, I present BACKDATED – The Launch of Twenty Albums. As well as documenting my own musical creations throughout the decades, this launch is also a chance to look back at the many different forms of recording technology we've experienced in the last two and a half decades - from cassette, to minidisc, to 8-track, and the evolution of the DAW. Please enjoy the wonderful album covers designed by Judith Brugger, as you explore the complete BACKDATED collection.