NOW OUT - Trilogy Finale "SALVAGING THE FUTURE"
Updated: Sep 23
Dean De Benedictis here. My record label has recently kept me so busy that I'm only now finally getting around to updating my own website. Excuse that. I'm still very happy and even relieved to announce that my last album of the Salvaging trilogy - Salvaging The Future - is now out and available everywhere through Spotted Peccary Music. This includes Spotify, Bandcamp, Apple Music, and as hardcase CDs at the retailer of anyone's choosing. Hyperlinks are in the images and obviously scattered throughout this entry. More below.
More Info, And The Story Behind Salvaging The Future
The Salvaging trilogy began in 2005 as a way of opening the boxes. At first, it was well over a decade of unreleased electronic music, whole periods of my life captured in sound, sitting on drives and tapes. The first album, Salvaging The Past, was a way of honoring that older work, while the second, Salvaging The Present in 2015, was a way of showing myself what was musically and aesthetically possible. This last album of the trilogy, Salvaging The Future, became all about pushing those previously found possibilities as forward as I could manage to, marking a shift in my perspective and my process.
The makings of:
That first album lived in hardware: 70s-to-90s synthesizers and rack gear. The second album went mobile on a single laptop, written on mountains, overlooks, in deserts, canyons, cafes, libraries, plane cabins and abandoned buildings.
This last album, Salvaging The Future, somehow fractured forward as two remaining laptops and a tower, all of them unstable but somehow tonally correct. I endured them. They would constantly lock up, forcing me to swap systems and applications like rituals and riddles. I spent years re-working the foundations, using new parts over old sketches, complete re-synthesis, found sound, custom sample libraries, and a drum-hit library I built in 2014 where each hit trails the reverb of a sung note. Every track is stacked with processors and automation, most instruments stacked upon each other as well. The older material became scaffolding, challenging the new arrangements layered on top — faster sequencers, wilder structures, yet still as much melody and emotion as my heart could squeeze out.
The years of re-composing, re-performing, solving constant technical cruxes just to finish mixes--yet through it all I somehow made it.
Production years for Salvaging The Future were actually shared with a similar album I released in 2023 called A Stray Ending, on DiN Records, as handle Surface 10. In some ways, they are sister albums. Both works demanded a minimum level of refinement during life trials in full form at an endless variety of locations: through life on the road, dangerous natural environments, band breakups, family upheaval, a pandemic, hard drive thefts, car crashes and yes system crashes at every step. But my standard still held firm: innovation balanced with sincerity and absolutely no substituting my original vision for the album. There would be no replacement tracks, only the original track concepts, even if reincarnated.
Sound design was more of a priority on Salvaging The Future, so live musicians and guests aren’t as abundant. However, I did play many of the instruments myself again, such as electric bass, guitar, piano, flute, vocals, etc.. The few friends-and-family who can indeed be heard on this album include vocals by my sister Lara De Benedictis, vocals by Stratos Ensemble singer Nichole Michelle Jones, guitar effects by Phil Williams (Surface 10 guitarist), vocals by Claire Raymond who sang on the second Salvaging album, and indigenous vocals and flute by Central Navajo friend D’Von Charley again, who also recorded on the second album Salvaging The Present.
This third and final Salvaging album holds the most complex and most contrasting styles in the series because it took the most time and the most effort to resolve. There’s enough life experience in it that it’s odd flirtation between the abstract and the idiomatic was unavoidable. Of course the album was going to come out this way. Of course. It embodies all of that.
The title Salvaging The Future holds two meanings for me. One is technological: I tried to inject futurism into every decision from sound design to rhythmic motion. This angle was influenced in part by Ray Kurzweil’s singularity theories, which arguably might be the most fancifully unifying plausibility ever theorized by futurists. The other idea behind it is purely human; we don’t move ahead by ignoring the future; we envision its progress while mindful action and hope likely do the rest. Those beliefs guided me through this album’s adversity, as perhaps they can through the course of humanity as well--one would hope. Tasks and times get challenging, practically hopeless, but I held steadfast and made it--so it's my humble belief that yes, humanity can make it as well.
Salvaging The Future imagines a moment where the future is arriving, both as a personal evolution and an inevitable technological development with objective hope for humanity. To me, the music portrays a combination of the approaching technological oneness and a resolving single life. It imagines a post-singularity time period where planetary systems and celestial bodies morph together in a futuristic void, isolation simultaneously thinning out while also expanding into a single soul -- as I would have it for my own mind and life. The album hints at all this while carrying the weight of my last 21 years on Earth. Older pieces gave it a starting point, but the newer parts, the re-writes, the arrangements I fought to finish — those are what define it. For me, this is where the arc lands.
Salvaging The Future is available:
