It’s Valentine’s Day, a day for love and cuddling—or, perhaps, for sobbing gently while eating doughnuts over the kitchen sink.  In this day and age, there is no wrong answer.

Well, there is one wrong answer:  not picking up Electrock Retrospective, Volume II: Technological Romance—celebrating its tenth anniversary today—for the very romantic price of $2.14.

Way back in college, during my last semester, I composed an album of electronic music over one frantic weekend, dubbed Electrock Music.  I distributed copies with hand-taped printed labels and liner notes to my Fiction Workshop class, this being long before digital distribution was easy (I’m curious to know if any of those copies are still out there, or getting listened to at all).

I followed that up a year later with 2007’s Electrock II: Space Rock, a programmatic tour through the music of our Solar System (in a hopefully-not-too-distant future).  I was in graduate school living in (essentially) a studio apartment, but hosted a massive record release party (again, with CD-R copies and printed labels taped to the jewel case) complete with pizza and snacks.  I was living in Knoxville, Tennessee at the time, and had friends drive up from South Carolina, with probably thirty or forty people at one point crammed into my tiny apartment.  Ah, youth.

After that, my electronic composing output dwindled as life and a budding teaching career took over.  I also arranged heavily for Brass to the Future in those years, but came out with my favorite electronic release, Electrock EP: The Four Unicorns of the Apocalypse, in 2012, after returning to teaching.

I had long planned to compose Electrock III, which I conceived as a massive (and decadent) double-album, and while I wrote a few tracks for it, my composing stalled.  In 2013, I decided to repackage pieces from the two Electrock albums and the one Electrock EP in a series of “retrospectives.”  I think my intent was to release one each month, and would tease pieces from Electrock III, but that never materialized.

What did materialize were two retrospectives:  Electrock Retrospective, Volume I: Dance Party in January 2013 and Electrock Retrospective, Volume II: Technological Romance in February 2013.  The former featured the new track “Robobop“; the latter featured classic retreads from the earlier Electrock releases.

It’s hard to believe that ten years have passed (and seventeen since Electrock Music‘s release in 2006).  Like robots in love, time zips by in a buzzy blink.

Here’s to Technological Romance!

—TPP