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2019 was a year of several releases and re-releases and marked a turn in my music career, or at least how I approach it. Inspired by the words of a friend who told me not to give up music, in a time when I felt tired of getting nowhere, I created a Bandcamp page, then a SoundCloud profile, and, one thing leading to another, I ended up releasing my previous work on all platforms and also started a few other initiatives, this website/blog/playlist submission platform among them.

The year that finished yesterday marked the re-release of my legacy recordings (which were re-mixed/re-mastered) on platforms (before, I was betting only on Google Play).

Some of these songs came from my parallel project Inner Place and received new arrangements or recordings. One of my favourites is More Than You Know. Others came from my instrumental music project Purple Forest (which ended up becoming an album under This Light).

But the past year also saw the release of new songs, like On The Shinkansen, inspired by my trip to Japan.

It was a nice year. I changed my approach to music promotion, improved my production skills and got signed by three labels (from the U.K., Russia and Romania). I also self-released most of my legacy work and new tracks. It’s a lot of work. Composing and producing is a lot of work, but promoting maybe takes even more time than the hours I spend in the studio. But I don’t complain. Music is my passion and I feel really glad for having the opportunity to do this work.

In 2018. I had the opportunity to visit Greece, and while in a restaurant in Santorini, I came in contact with Vanilla Radio. Back home, I started listening to it daily and had the chance to discover music from artists of the Mediterranean (Vanilla plays music from all around the world though). I already used to like music with middle-eastern influence, having composed tracks for my metal band Hall of Dreams that invoked some of that musicality. This way, the music of artists like Valeron, Mahmut Orhan and a few others was a great find for me.

The trip and the radio programming were also a source of inspiration for me to compose four tracks that would form the EP In The Middle. Two of the tracks, Setting Sun and Hayat, have a lot to do with what I speak about above and are, to date, two of my favourite compositions. The other two tracks in the album, No Orleans and Low Light sound more like deep house (or whatever you feel they sound like, I do a terrible job trying to categorize my own compositions).

After almost releasing the EP through a label based in the US, I decided to self-release In The Middle and I don’t regret the decision. Setting Sun is This Light’s song with most of plays on Spotify.

For my next work, I wanted to come back to my uptempo roots and came up with an EP called The Third Wave. It was very experimental, not following the prevailing psytrance aesthetics of the decade. In 2019, I broke the set and three of the pieces were released by the Russian labels Exia and Arveg. I self-released the remaining one, Purple Glow.

The next release was a departure from my initial heavy-sounding compositions. I love change, and, this time, I wanted to do something more chill, another genre I appreciate a lot. So I came up with a set of six songs that became the EP The Abyss. That happened between 2011 and 2014, I can’t remember exactly.

After living unnoticed for some time on Google Play, it was removed when they stopped dealing directly with small artists.

In 2019, I started looking for label deals for some of my tracks and The Abyss ended up being re-released by the London-based label Miami Sundown Records.

After a heavy start, I decided to compose a few other songs with different patterns (the first three followed a verse/pre-chorus/verse/bridge structure), some of them using guitars, some pure electronic, some using alternative vocals tracks, like speech or simple vocalizations with no lyrics. One of my favourites is The Desert.

With a pack of 10 songs, I had an album! I published these songs on last.fm (that site was a useful tool for small, independent artists around 2009). The album was initially called This Light. Last.fm changed and they are not hosting music anymore. This year, the album was removed from the Google Play store (the last place where it could be found) when they changed the rules regarding small artists. It will be re-released next year, with another name, in order to prevent confusion with the single release for This Light.