James Milsom

This is a collection of the best songs i've managed to write, performed by the best musicians i've ever worked with and put together to the highest standard I could hope for. It's going to be released pretty soon after this campaign is finished, and an album launch will take place some time thereafter, but this campaign gives you the chance for an advance copy.

Impossible Future is an album about belief. I'm a bit obsessed with understanding what humans will believe in, why they do, and what can break their belief. Or what their belief can break. So it's about a lot of things, but I wanted to do what I could to get away from the introspective on this one. And I kind of succeeded.

Impossible Future is my fourth record, with some little mix tapes and demo releases along the way. My first two releases (self titled then In Consciousness and Out) with Ancient Free Gardeners were followed a few years later by an album under the pseudonym 'Jamesy Ohhh'. My writing and playing developed over that period of time, and I think this album is a bit of a culmination of it all. Impossible Future has lots of live playing, collaboration with other musicians and some sentimental themes like the Gardeners stuff did, but it's got plenty of the electronic stuff i've been working on more recently too. 

I wrote Impossible Future over a couple of years, sketching and demoing songs in Tel Aviv, Belgrade, Queenscliff and... at home in Footscray.  I whittled the tunes down to the 10 I loved most and recorded them with a few amazing musicians. Mark Leahy, a drummer I was lucky to meet on a project in Tasmania called Acoustic Life of Sheds, took my sequenced parts and made explosion with his hands. Nate Gilkes, my co-writer and performer in the Sheds project, played the piano and some of the synth bits. Xani Kolac is an amazing violinist who plays in an outfit called The Twoks with Mark (mentioned above), and she laid down all of the strings parts. Which was freakishly great. 

I recorded the album a bit by myself in Sandy Point and Footscray, but mostly with Phil Threlfall, a bloody wonderful sound engineer. We worked at The Base in South Melbourne, where we also mixed the album. Phil has worked with some gigantic names, including lots of hip hop artists, which was appealling to me given the way lots of the songs were put together, and the way Mark played the drums parts. 

The total budget for Impossible Future is $11,700, and i'm covering more than half of it ($5,700).

Engineer, studio hire etc for recording and mix: $4,000

Session musicians: $1,400

Hosting, extra productiony costs and misc: $300

Publicity and marketing: $5,000

If I manage to get more than my target, i'll bolster the publicity funding and put money toward some special ideas i've got for the album launch. No matter what, i'll be committing my share.

I've set the target for this campaign at $4,200 to account for the 5% Pozible takes if the campaign is successful.

The live show for this album is going to be interesting. Once you hear the album, you'll get what I mean. For a note by note performance of each song, I would need a string quartet, a horn section, two drummers, a keys player, a bass player and me. And a few vocalists would help. So - converting it into something I can perform is my challenge. I'm starting with some solo performances so I can get into the songs that way, then i'm rehearsing with a bare bones band to see what computers can do to make it work.

But you know what? I quite like this challenge. I think working the songs into performance versions is going to be awesome. I'm doing it right now. And it's fun.