This was mostly written and recorded throughout 1999, though some of it goes as far back as 1997. Lots of firsts came with this album.
Noel2k was my most cohesive album yet. Previous albums has been collections of one-off experiments and improvisations. Creating this involved going through hours of improvisations, searching for pieces that fit a certain mood. I wound up with 14 pieces, then whittled it down to these 8. Then I arranged the hell out of them; save for some sectioning, cleaning, and adding and removing superfluous repeats, these are all pretty much just rerecordings of the original improvisations with lots and lots of stuff piled on.
This was the first thing I ever recorded entirely on my computer; everything was recorded using an Echo Layla 20-bit soundcard using Cakewalk Pro Audio 8 for the mixing.
This was also the first time I'd ever really spent a large portion of time on one set of pieces. This is an approach I obviously took to -- my current project involves between 7 - 10 pieces that I've been refining for about 7 years now.