people are going to be arguing about this for basically ever. at the end of the day, the key point is that people aren't necessarily rational - if you want to know why people do things, you need to ask them and hope they aren't lying. but, i see it like this:

1) the most confounding point is why austria attacked serbia, knowing it was going to spark a war against russia. you can say something about historical control or whatever, but none of the arguments are really good. the only thing that makes any sense to me - besides outright idiocy - is that they were trying to dismantle prussia under the hope that they'd gain control in the end. that is, it might have been a sneaky tactic to unite the german heartland under hapsburg rather than hohenzollern control. that makes it an indirect result of the austro-prussian war of 1866, and ultimately an inter-german conflict.

2) russia had long been looking for an excuse to "unite the slavs". they were aiming to dismantle austria and absorb most of it. this is well understood.

3) the ottomans had their own interests in eastern europe and saw russian expansion as a security threat.

4) the germans knew that the belgians were not truly neutral. that's the unstated point, the necessary revision. if they left belgium sitting on the coast, it would have opened up staging grounds and spy networks. if they were going to invade france (and they had to to deal with the two front problem), they had no choice but to attack belgium.

5) i agree that the french saw the germans as weak and intended to dismantle them, with russian help. but, they expected the russians to do most of the work.

6) the british involvement had less to do with europe and more to do with africa. "belgian neutrality" meant "not taking over belgian colonies in africa". the british were both interested in reducing german influence in africa and, frankly, in not letting the germans get the spoils of belgian absorption. they may have agreed with the principle of neutrality so long as belgium was under de facto british alliance, but as soon as the germans invaded the congo became up for grabs.

7) the americans intervened largely to prevent a socialist revolution in germany and france, after what was happening in russia became clear.

the thing that screwed everything up for the western powers (and austria) and created the stalemate was russia's greater interest in the south than the north. had russia marched straight to berlin as they were supposed to, the prussians would have been dismantled and probably partitioned, and the british would have taken over most of their colonies in africa. oddly, the british and french may have ended up aligning with the ottomans in a drawn out russian-ottoman conflict that may have seen deep russian penetration into the middle east.

this is a dramatically different outcome and potential world order, and was likely made in a snap decision by the russian generals.

publishing ambient works vol 0-2 (inri071 + inri035)

i've got the mix tape up which means inri048 is now done...

i've got a number of snippets after about 1999 that i'm not sure what to do with. i'm probably going to just forget about most of it, but some of it will no doubt end up on volume 3, which will be somewhere in the 60s or 70s. so i'll just put it aside for later.

i put aside a number of compilation ideas as i was sorting through the material. i wasn't expecting anything to get a release in this space, but i'm now questioning that. it's largely a process of elimination. but right now it'slooking like inri050 is actually going to be a similarly epic guitar-focused disc.

that said, there's plenty of guitars on this disc, especially in the mix tape. i'll post it when i figure it out...

===

i've taken to splitting my discography into phases, and my hitch-hiking trip to british columbia is a very important separation point - both in terms of the nature of the material that came out afterwards and what is now a substantial body of work that came before it. that makes it a natural point to look backwards and build compilations of intersecting ideas.

a characteristic of my work is that it does not conform well to genre norms. this is not an accident; when compiling a record, i'm guided more by the late beatles' philosophy of vast diversity in a small space than i am by any kind of desire to collect together nice singles, or by some kind of compulsive organizing into categories or concepts. i write psychedelic music. that means something different in 2015 than it did in 1966, but the commonality is that it's necessarily challenging. i want all of my records to do everything at once, and accomplish everything by their end point. that makes compilations of this sort inherently difficult, because every song touches on every compilation idea at the same time. the jazz record would have the same tracklisting as the punk record, the classical record and the folk record - and none would really be what they're claimed to be.

the one exception to this conundrum is how i interacted with ambient music in this period. i very regularly utilized ideas from the genre, but i tended to interpret ambience as something that is necessarily obscure. in this period, ambient pieces are almost always outtakes or b sides. i tended to interpret covers and remixes as ambient pieces, probably because that was unexpected. when ambient ideas make it on to the record, they're almost always for effect: introductions, endings, connecting passages, that sort of thing.

when i began reconstructing my discography in early 2014, i came across a handful of songs i'd written out into midi format and put aside for later. a number of these ended up reworked into ambient pieces, and released as b sides. i also ended up converting some of the material i wrote in this period into ambient sound collages that are more in the style of music i created after 2003.

the end result is enough bsides and remixes to put together two full cds of ambient music. none of the tracks on volumes one or two are on any official record as they appear here; this is technically a collection of remixes and outtakes.

initially written and recorded between 2000-2003 and remixed between 2014-2015. sequenced over mid may, 2015. final compilation date is may 21, 2015,. as always, please use headphones.

credits:
j - guitars (acoustic, electric, nylon), effects & treatments, bass, synthesizers, electric air reed organ, orchestral & other sequencing, drum & other programming, generative programming (sounder), "projectile synthesis" (audiomulch), granular synthesis (granulab), sound design, electronic and conventional drum kits, sampling, loops, films, voice, digital wave editing, composition, production.

sean - vocal ideas (tracks 4 & 7, disc 1), ring modulator (track 9, disc 1)
jon - background guitar performance (track 4, disc 1)
greg - drum performance sample source (track 5, disc 1)

the various rendered electronic orchestras include synth bass, electric bass, acoustic bass, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, nylon guitar, guitar effects, guitar noises (fret noises, pick scrapes, knocks), synthesizer, synth pads, mellotron, choir, violin, viola, cello, contrabass, string section, pizzicato strings, french horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba, oboe, english horn, bassoon, clarinet, flute, piccolo, mallet, piano, woodblock, music box, xylophone, tubular bells, other bells, orchestra hit, electronic drum kit, melodic toms, drum machine and orchestral drum kit.

released april 28, 2003

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/ambient-works-vol-0-2

ambient works vol 0, side b

side b mixes various ambient sections from period 1.2 and period 1.3, which, here, is all over 1999. mix created on may 21, 2015.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/side-b

ambient works vol 0, side a

side a mixes various noise and ambient sections from period 1.1 and period 1.2, which is 1996-1999. mix created on may 21, 2015.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/side-a