The question emerged while I was still deep in the creation of New Era. I'd pushed into aggressive, industrial, hyperpop-leaning territories: metallic textures, shrieking highs, chaotic rhythms barely held together by 4/4 time signatures. I'd asked myself: how abrasive can music become while remaining intentionally compelling rather than pure noise? But once I'd answered that question through twenty tracks of controlled sonic aggression, a new one surfaced:
What comes after exploring extremes?
The answer wasn't more extremes. It was constraint.
I realized that sampling, something that had been a quiet constant in my musical life, something I'd actively avoided rather than embraced, represented the next frontier. Not because I needed to prove I could sample, but because my aversion to it made it the perfect creative challenge. The most radical step forward wasn't adding new tools to my arsenal. It was stripping everything away and working solely with the raw history of my own catalog.
This realization became Nothing New, an album built entirely from what I'd already created: an hour-long continuous listen where nearly every track transitions seamlessly into the next despite frequent shifts in tempo, key, and emotional tone. More than that, it became a technical and philosophical investigation into what happens when you strip away the option to start fresh.
The Constraint as Answer
During the making of New Era, I was discovering the limits of sonic aggression while also becoming aware of my own creative patterns. I'd been making music prolifically (15+ full releases between 2020 and 2023), and as I continued to produce, I noticed something: my relationship with sampling had always been complicated. I'd use samples sparingly, cautiously. There was always a voice in the back of my mind suggesting that "real" sound design meant generating everything from scratch, building sounds from sine waves up.
But constraints have a way of revealing truth. When you remove options, you're forced to confront what actually matters. Looking at my world now, I just got Splice and have been exploring its sample libraries, but Nothing New marked the beginning of understanding the creative value that could come from working with pre-existing material. But I still hadn't fully committed to the idea.
I had done similar things in tracks before, calling them motifs such as in New Era. But never a commitment to it in totality. So I made the commitment absolute: what if I made an entire album using only samples, but samples exclusively from my own past work? What if I banned myself from creating anything new?
The constraint was simple to state but complex in its implications. It would force me to listen to my own history differently, to discover what was actually valuable in years of production, and to see if I could transform memory into something that moved forward rather than backward.
The Technical Problem of Seamlessness
Here's where philosophy meets engineering reality.
I wanted Nothing New to feel like one continuous piece, or at the very least, a collection of tracks that transitioned so smoothly that the seams were part of the aesthetic rather than technical failures. This wasn't about making a mixtape or a compilation. I wanted genuine flow, the sensation of constant forward motion even though the source material came from entirely different creative moments, different albums, different keys, different tempos, different emotional states.
The technical challenge was enormous. I had stems and audio from albums spanning years. Some tracks were written in major keys, others in minor. Some at 120 BPM, others at 140, 90, 165. Some were compressed and mastered, others were raw exports from early demos. Some featured heavy electronic processing, others were nearly acoustic.
How do you make material that was never meant to coexist play nicely together? More importantly, how do you make it feel inevitable: like each transition was always meant to happen, like the entire album was conceived as a unified whole even though it's built from scattered fragments?
The answer required imposing strict rules that would paradoxically create freedom.
The Hard Rules That Solve It
I enforced one of the strictest creative constraints of my entire discography. The rule was simple: if you open a project file for Nothing New, you should see only audio files. No MIDI. No synth plugins. No virtual instruments. No patterns. Just WAV files pulled from old sessions.
I allowed myself exactly two things:
- Time manipulation (stretching, compressing, changing tempo)
- Pitch manipulation (transposition, formant shifting, Varispeed)
- Chopping, Splicing, and adding any type of effects.
That was it. Everything else was forbidden.
I'll be honest: there were maybe one or two exceptions where I generated a new synth element because the track absolutely demanded it. I'd estimate the album is 95–99% pure audio sourcing from my own history. But the constraint was never about achieving 100% purity for its own sake. It was about forcing myself into a creative space where I couldn't rely on my usual escape hatches.
When you're producing normally, you hit a problem and think, "I'll just make a new pad sound," or "I'll synthesize a bass that fits better." Those options smooth over creative friction, but they also prevent you from discovering what's possible when you work only with what exists.
The constraint forced creativity to arise from recombination, transformation, and reinterpretation rather than new sound generation. It made me ask different questions: not "what sound do I need?" but "what do I already have that could become what I need?"
Surprisingly, I always had something.
Execution: Pulling From the Archive
My approach to selecting source material was deliberately anti-curatorial. I didn't want to cherry-pick only the "best" moments from my catalog. I wanted everything: interesting sounds, uninteresting sounds, high-energy stems, quiet moments, simple melodies, complex arrangements, material from nearly every album I'd made.
I wanted the entire landscape of my past work available as raw material, because I had no idea what would become useful. That "boring" bassline from a track I'd abandoned in 2021 might become the foundation of something entirely new when placed in a different context, pitched down, and layered with vocals from New Era.
I pulled stems somewhat randomly. A drum loop here, an isolated vocal phrase there, a synthesizer pad that I'd buried in the mix three years ago but suddenly heard differently when played solo. Sometimes I'd export entire sections of tracks—mixdowns, reverb tails, half of regions—just to have options. Other times I'd extract single hits: one piano note, one snare, one cymbal crash.
The unpredictability of this process created a natural diversity in the album's sonic palette. Because I wasn't being strategic, I wasn't defaulting to my own taste biases. I was forced to work with whatever I'd happened to create, which meant working with past versions of myself who had different priorities, different technical skills, different emotional states.
What I reaffirmed: my past self was more interesting than I'd given him credit for.
Solving for Flow: Grouping by Tempo and Key, Not Theme
The technical methodology for creating seamless transitions came down to two primary factors: tempo compatibility and key relationships.
I started by analyzing every track I'd pulled. What key was it in? What tempo? Could it be shifted without losing its essential character? Logic's Varispeed function became my primary tool (not just for changing tempo, but for proportional pitch and tempo shifting that preserved the relationship between the two).
Varispeed is a way to speed things up or slow things down in fixed increments, and it allows you to shift by percentages, which means you can land in microtonal spaces between standard semitones. This was critical because many of my stems weren't in perfectly compatible keys. A track in C# minor and a track in D minor don't naturally transition well. But if you use Varispeed to shift one of them gradually by something like 3.7%, suddenly they're speaking the same harmonic language.
I also exploited a quirk in my own workflow: most of my demo projects in Logic default to 120 BPM, and I don't always change it. This meant that a surprising number of stems, despite coming from different albums and different years, were already at the same tempo, or close enough that minor Varispeed adjustments could lock them together perfectly.
The grouping process for the arrangement of tracks became almost mathematical. I'd cluster tracks not by their emotional content or thematic relationships, but by their technical compatibility. Three tracks all landing within a half-step of each other in key or relatives and within 10 BPM of each other in tempo? They're going to be arranged together in the track listing.
This approach had an unexpected benefit. Because I wasn't grouping by theme, the emotional juxtapositions were often surprising. A melancholic piano phrase from 2021, suddenly surrounded by aggressive metallic hits from New Era, created tension I never would have planned. The technical constraint generated artistic discovery.
Of course, not every transition worked perfectly. There are a few moments on the album where I can still hear the seam, where the key change feels slightly forced or where the tempo shift is just a bit too abrupt. But I came to see those imperfections as part of the album's honesty. This is an album about working with what exists, not about achieving technical perfection. The rough edges are the proof that this is real recombination, not clever studio trickery.
What Working With Memory Teaches You
Something unexpected happened when I spent months immersed in my own back catalog: I started hearing myself differently.
Patterns emerged that I'd never consciously planned. Certain melodic intervals (particularly a perfect fourth that I apparently love) showed up across albums written years apart. Rhythmic tendencies: I have a habit of placing syncopated hits on the "and" of beat 3. Harmonic choices: I gravitate toward sus 2 and sus 4 chords far more than I realized, using them to create tension that never quite resolves.
These weren't intentional signatures. They were fingerprints, unconscious markers of my musical identity that only became visible when I studied the accumulated evidence.
I also found tracks I'd completely forgotten about, demos from 2021 that never made it onto albums but were genuinely good. Not just "good for their time" but actually good, holding up years later despite less sophisticated mixing and production. There was a sincerity in those older pieces, an emotional directness I'd sometimes lost as I became more technically proficient.
This is where Nothing New became something more than a technical exercise. It became an act of respect, for my past work, for my past self, for the creative instincts I'd had before I knew all the "right" ways to do things.
Working with memory also clarified something important about my artistic philosophy: I don't believe in linear progress. I don't think my newest work is inherently "better" than my old work just because I've learned more. Each phase of my development was doing something valuable, solving different problems, accessing different emotional registers. Nothing New became a way of honoring all of those phases simultaneously, letting them speak to each other across time.
There's also a crucial distinction to make here: this isn't remixing. Remixing typically takes a single track and reimagines it: same DNA, different expression. Nothing New is recomposition. I'm taking fragments from dozens of tracks and assembling them into entirely new structures. The resulting pieces don't sound like any of the source material, just echos. They're not recognizable as "the track from Pristine Inertia but with different production." They're new entities that happen to be built from old atoms.
The closest analogy: it's like breaking down your old house and using the reclaimed wood, glass, and metal to build something that's never existed before. Sure, the materials have history. Yes, you can sometimes see the grain pattern from the original structure. However, the architecture is completely new.
The 2021 Tracks: What Ages Well
The final tracks on Nothing New break from the album's core constraint. These are older features from 2021, complete pieces rather than recombinations, that never found homes on earlier albums.
I included them for several reasons, some practical, some emotional.
Practically: they still hold up. The production and mixing are surprisingly tight for where I was technically at that point. The energy is distinct: each one has a different vibe, which adds to the album's overall diversity. And honestly, they would have been cool to sample, and I think I actually did sample some of them within the album's earlier remixed sections.
Emotionally: there's a nostalgia factor. These tracks represent a specific phase of my artistic development, moments where I can envision exactly where I was in my room, the smell, the sound of the space, when I was only able to blabber captured feeling, instead of now growing technical and feeling mix.
If I remade them today, I would improve the mixing. I'd probably "electrify" them more, add more textural complexity, apply the production techniques I've learned since then. But fundamentally, I wouldn't change much. I respect my old music. I genuinely love it. I don't want anything to change.
That phrase, "I don't want anything to change," is important. It reveals something about why Nothing New exists at all. This album isn't about correcting the past or "fixing" old ideas. It's about accepting what I've created and finding new life in it without erasing its original form.
The 2021 tracks serve as a reminder that evolution doesn't mean abandonment. You can move forward while still honoring where you've been.
What Nothing New Revealed
Making this album taught me things I couldn't have learned any other way.
First, it revealed just how much material I've actually created. Twenty-plus albums is an abstract number until you're literally pulling hundreds of stems and realizing: this is all me. Every sound, every melody, every rhythm: I made all of this. There's something both humbling and empowering about confronting the full scope of your own creative output.
Second, it demonstrated that change and consistency aren't opposites. They're partners. Yes, my sound has evolved dramatically from 2020 to 2025. But there are through-lines, recurring instincts, consistent values that show up regardless of which tools I'm using or which aesthetic I'm exploring. Nothing New makes those through-lines audible in a way that listening to albums chronologically never could.
Third, it proved that constraint doesn't limit creativity. When I removed the option to generate new sounds, I didn't feel trapped. I felt liberated. Every decision became simpler because the possibility space was bounded. Instead of infinite options paralyzing me, finite materials forced me to make choices and commit to them.
Fourth, and this is the most personal revelation, it showed me that I genuinely respect my own work. This might sound obvious, but I think many artists struggle with this. We're often our own harshest critics, dismissing past work as "not good enough" or "embarrassing." Spending months working with my catalog forced me to confront the quality of what I'd made when I didn't think anyone was paying attention. And I discovered: it's good. Not perfect, not without flaws, but genuinely good. Worth building on. Worth preserving.
Finally, Nothing New clarified my broader artistic philosophy: I don't chase novelty for its own sake. My "newness" comes from recombination, recontextualization, and evolution rather than constant reinvention. I'm not trying to sound different from track to track. I'm trying to push my existing voice into new emotional and technical territories.
This album is the purest expression of that philosophy. It's called Nothing New not as a limitation but as a statement of intent: you don't need new materials to create something that's never existed before. You just need new ways of hearing what's already there.
For other artists, creatives, and out-of-the-box thinkers reading this, the lesson isn't "you should make a self-sampling album."
Ask yourself: what have you been avoiding? What material do you dismiss as "not good enough" to revisit? What constraints would force you to work differently, again, not harder, but differently?
Your creative aversion might be your next frontier. The thing you think you "can't" do might be exactly what unlocks your next phase of growth.
For me, that aversion was sampling. By embracing it absolutely, by stripping away every escape route, I discovered new capacities in old material and new respect for the artist I used to be.
What would you discover if you worked only with what you've already created? What if you trusted your past self enough to build your future on that foundation?
Those questions don't have easy answers. But they're worth asking.
And sometimes, the asking is where the real work begins.