*** Note: If you purchased the "(forgot the word)" vinyl on Bandcamp - this release is included in your download. ***

To celebrate the first vinyl reissue of my 2009 debut album "(forgot the word)", I dug into my archive and put together an EP of material that didn't make it to the final release for all sorts of reasons.

Making a 100% sample-based album is a tricky quest when you're a beginning artist and crate digger: you work with what you have/find. Often you don't even know what pieces you're missing until you hear them. Sometimes one round of a few shops is enough to make a whole new track from start to finish (like it was with "Light" or "Leap Forward"), sometimes it takes months and even years of digging to perfect the initial idea and sometimes the right samples never appear. Eventually, if you're patient and persistent enough - you may find any missing pieces you need. Digging truly is an endless journey and, as proved by generations of beatmakers, - no lifetime is enough to explore everything and no record can be sampled in just one way.
Despite being a solo debut, "(forgot the word)" wasn't the beginning of this journey for me, but rather its conclusion - a "graduation project" in sample digging and beat-making, if you will. As much as I enjoyed the challenge of being creative within the restraints of vinyl finds, by the time I finished the album, I was already moving towards different approaches in music-making. The rest is history.

This EP offers a peek into the process of making "(forgot the word)". I called it "Shallow Crates" because, speaking in the vinyl diggers' slang, that was the main reason for these cuts not making it onto the final album. It starts with the first version of "Dream of Africa", which I made in 2004. You can hear that the basic idea and the long, complex form of the track are already there. But it's not as rich musically as the take that appears on the record. There's also the first demo of "Dawn" with a different, less fitting chopped beat. "L'histoire d'Autumne" is a tune I made around 2002 - not long after "Japanese Fonts". It was rejected due to the lack of depth, compared to the rest of the material. Besides that, I included here two unfinished tracks - "Journey" and "Noah's Buses" - as examples of never finding the right pieces to complete a complex idea.