Going Into 2024
Happy Birthday to me! I’m 26 today, an age that still surprises me some days, and I haven’t said a word here since I was 25. So, with 2023 quickly coming to a close, I figured this was a good time to go over some of what this year entailed, as well as some things I’m looking forward to in the upcoming year.
For starters, this was a pretty light year as far as releases go. I went into 2023 with a ton of ideas for new works and had the hope that it would be the year of many releases and many projects. Obviously that didn’t pan out, but in a way I’m glad that it didn’t. I spent most of the year working on one thing or another, and while I didn’t release very much of it, it was a good experience to just focus on creating for awhile without pushing myself to meet deadlines. While hitting release dates is important, what’s more important is making certain that the work you’re creating is worth publishing in the first place. In the time that I’ve been mostly silent I have learned a lot about myself, the creative process, and the kinds of things that I like to make. I think I took 2022 in too much stride, looking always to the horizon and rushing myself through projects. An Unravelling Mind, while I adore the work, turned out very different from what I was intending and I still have the desire to create what I had originally designed for that film. Another project, written by a good friend of mine, was produced in such a haphazard way that I’m still struggling to edit it in a way that works over a year later. All this to say: I learned to take my time.
Going into 2024 I want to use what I learned and continue to grow even further. I came up with a number of rough ideas over the past year, and did a decent amount of pre-production on a couple of them whenever I had the time to. I won’t say too much as far as the projects themselves, but there are three main pieces that I have in my mind to work on this next year. One of them I have talked a decent bit about on social media, being my next album, and while it’s gone through a few major shake-ups it finally is in a place that feels like I’m really making progress on something special and not just throwing ideas at a blackboard anymore. The other two are multimedia projects, one with more story than the other, and I have spent the past month or so in a shifting state of writing, scouting, planning, and filming. I still need to decide on cast and crew in a few areas, but right now the focus is on getting the projects into such a solid place that I don’t run into the same logistical errors I have in the past.
Finally, there’s my shift in overall direction and some retconning as it were. I mentioned towards the middle of the year that I was giving up on the “brand” Whales Don’t Dream. It isn’t so much of a big change, but what I mean as far as that goes is that I sort of lost myself. Whales Don’t Dream was an attempt at being bigger than I am, and bigger than I really want to be. The fact is that it sort of became a representation of what I was talking about earlier with taking things too fast and moving forward when I wasn’t ready. I created the brand when I already had something that was truly my own, and the idea was that Whales Don’t Dream could be a collective, while Abolith would stay me. I don’t really need a collective. I have people, I have myself, and we don’t have to have some kind of banner to work together. As part of all of this process I have been going back through my older work and figuring out what works for me and what doesn’t. For example: I unpublished Preemo for the time-being as it has always felt like a hodge-podge of a work and it just doesn’t really have much of a point to me. I threw the album together out of random ideas and hoped it would stick, and to be honest I never really liked it. I also want to remaster Out of Touch and do some work on some of my other works to make them really special. I know so much more about music, sound, and film than I did when I created them, and after this past year of studying and growing in my skillset I would like to extend that learning to what I made before as well as what I will make in the future.
Alright, that about sums it all up. I know it was a bit long, but I wanted to make certain all the bases were covered. I appreciate you having read this far, and hope you’ll tune in to the next post when I have a little more substance for you. Until then, much love from my little corner of the world.
Joshua Alexander Tabor
Abolith
