New YouTube Drop: Cats on Earth - Low Orbit (2023) Videos

A new batch of videos just dropped on my YouTube channel for the 2023 Cats on Earth release Low Orbit.

We’ll call this the Third Wave of the CoE project. After producing La Fin Triste in 2005, I decided to take a break from making Cats on Earth music for awhile to focus on steering my work in a different direction. I’d been growing tired of the tedious nature of producing the type of music the project had evolved into, the intense focus on each sound, each drum hit, the personal pressure to continue outdoing myself and I wanted to get back to something that felt more immediate and spontaneous. I wanted to fall back in love with making music again.

So I moved on to some projects that would force me to work in different ways. I experimented with a guitar-based setup to make rock music (Nova Satori), stripped everything back to a rudimentary all-hardware studio setup (Com-S), jammed out electro-funk inspired hip-hop (Largo), and developed a more dance-focused project to provide the soundtrack to a comic story I was working on (moto-SLAVE).

Then in 2019, something started brewing again. It initially started as simple distraction. I downloaded a DAW app for my Android phone (Caustic) and started messing around making beats on lunch breaks or before bed. I was surprised at how much I was able to do with just a phone that I found myself continuing to push the limits to see what the software could do. Before I knew it, I was chopping breaks, designing synth patches, and figuring out how to record samples and I realized I still had some CoE left in me.

I transitioned from the phone to the laptop, upgraded my old copy of Ableton and went on a 2-year stretch of just banging out the kind of 90s-style drum and bass that initially ignited my passion for electronic music production (well, my take on it anyway). My favorite tracks from this era were packed up into 2 releases: Machine Learning (2022) and Low Orbit (2023).

The tracks on Low Orbit are a bit more experimental and conceptual than its predecessor, but continues with the theme of classic jungle breaks, lush analog pads, and a retro-futuristic aesthetic that have defined this Third Wave.