After spending the past several months beavering away on both the ULTRAsomething retrospective book (So Far So So) and re-coding this website from the ground up, I planned to spend February working on UTRAsomething Magazine Exorcism 09.
So much for plans.
In late January, I wrote and recorded two new songs, which I posted to the ULTRAsomething site. Thanks to a coding snafu (surprisingly not of my own making), subscriber notification was botched, and not a lot of people read that post. “No big deal,” I thought, “it’s just music.” But the more I thought about it, the more I decided music IS a big deal, and maybe it’s time I put some effort into creating an ULTRAsomething musical retrospective as well.
The timing was ideal. I’d already drawn a line demarcating 2026 as the beginning of the new ULTRAsomething, and 2025 as the final year of the old. Making things even tidier was the fact that a song I wrote in 2000 was the first song uploaded to the original ULTRAsomething site (eight years before it became a photography blog). So I could do a quarter-century musical retrospective (2000-2025) of ULTRAsomething musical material.
Unlike So Far So So, which absolutely needed to be physical media, the musical retrospective could get away with being digital. Problem was, I’d never bothered to put any of this music on any of the major streaming sites, since I never intended it to be anything other than support music for ULTRAsomething.
So the new plan emerged: assemble a quarter-century ULTRAsomething music retrospective album, and make it available to all the major streaming services.
Done.
The end result is nearly three hours of remastered music. Much of it was released in some form or other in the past — either as stand-alone music, or as soundtracks I wrote specifically to accompany numerous ULTRAsomething vBooks. A couple songs were written & published to showcase synthesizer sound libraries I had designed, and the rest are a smattering of unpublished recordings, including a few “live” recordings (no multitracking — just realtime improvisations, often recorded direct to iPhone).
Given this, the title became obvious: Sounds, Tracks & Soundtracks. I once again relied on Nicole Langdon-Davies to design the cover (as she had done for So Far So So) to ensure a sort of cohesion between the two different mediums. The cover art is perfect, since it looks exactly like the music sounds — always the Holy Grail of album art design.
I’d planned to release it as one long 47-song album, which began with music from 2000 and ended with music from 2025, but the universe (as usual) intervened. Apparently, many streaming services have a strict 35-song maximum on any album. Sure, you can circumnavigate this arbitrary number if you’ve got a name that makes people capitulate to your will. I don’t. I am the one who must capitulate. So once again, I embraced ULTRAsomething’s “Entropic Capitulation” tagline and split the album into two volumes. As often happens with entropic capitulation, this didn’t work out too badly. I kept Nicole’s original black on white cover art for volume 1, and simply inverted it to white on black for volume 2. This too, worked well, since volume 2 (which contains the newer recordings) is definitely the darker of the two releases, and I can now simply refer to them as ‘the white album’ and ‘the black album’.
Both the black and the white albums are available on all the major streaming platforms. Here are direct links to Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes, Tidal, and Amazon Music Unlimited:
Sounds, Tracks & Soundtracks (vol 1)
Sounds, Tracks & Soundtracks (vol 2)
Other stores and streams (such as Deezer and YouTube) are currently being uploaded/configured, so if your listening platform isn’t yet listed in the hyperlink above, try searching for ULTRAsomething in your music streaming service of choice.
Hopefully, this marks the end of my ‘retrospectives’ and I can now put the pedal to the metal on future projects… though I do have a nagging thought that I probably have enough vBooks and other films to do a blu-ray retrospective of ULTRAsomething videos… but I’m doing my damnedest to resist that temptation. You’re welcome.
©2026 grEGORy simpson
ABOUT THE PHOTOS :
Late in Volume 2 : Indeed, this was shot inside my recording studio late in the recording of Volume 2 — specifically around mid-2024. Not that I knew at the time there would be a Volume 2, much less a Volume 1. It was taken for the simple reason that I needed to burn the final frame on the Fuji Natura Black 1.9, so I could develop the roll. But, throwaway shot that it is, there’s still some insight to be gleaned. One, obviously, is that the look of studio pretty much explains the sound of the music. Anything this dark and murky will surely result in the sonic equivalent. Another is the photo’s ‘time capsule’ aspect, and the realization of how quickly gear turns over here. I basically have to run all that is ULTRAsomething out of a room that’s only around 8′ x 8′ (2.5m x 2.5m). This ensures I adhere to a strict one-in-one-out rule. So if there’s a new piece of studio gear I want, an old piece needs to be sacrificed. Believe me, I’d love to still have all the gear I’ve had for the past 50 years — Once gear reaches a certain age, it becomes much more valuable (unlike the way we view humans), and if I still had some of my synthesizers from the 80’s and 90’s, the studio could actually double as a retirement portfolio. Sadly, that’s not the case here. So, in spite of this shot being only two years old, I find myself looking at several pieces of gear that are no longer part of today’s studio.
Album Covers : As mentioned in the article, the cover art was created by Nicole Langdon-Davies, who also did the cover art for the So Far So So book.
REMINDER 1 : Don’t forget to order your copy of So Far So So from the Beau Photo website. Keep in mind that Beau prices products in Canadian Dollars and not U.S. Dollars. I recognize many readers don’t realize how weak and valueless the Canadian dollar is, so remember — that CAD$65 price tag you see is only (roughly) US$47, which, frankly, is a figurative steal.
REMINDER 2 : If you’ve managed to extract a modicum of enjoyment from the plethora of material contained on this site, please consider making a DONATION to its continuing evolution. As you’ve likely realized, ULTRAsomething is neither an aggregator site nor is it AI-generated. Serious time and effort go into developing the original content contained within these virtual walls — even the silly stuff. Those who enjoy a tactile engagement with photographs are encouraged to visit the ULTRAsomething STORE, where actual objects, including ULTRAsomething Magazine and the So Far So So anthology book are available for purchase.
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