I like Rick's discretion. He's so polite. But, ya, lay it on him. I'd love to see what you have to say.

Brian, I know what you mean about the feedback issue. I have given my links or recordings to several people with the hopes of getting some constructive criticism and received none. I think a lot of people are just worried that they'll be bursting my bubble, but I am just waiting for the first person that wants to tear me apart. That's valuable learning right there...even if it's uncomfortable at the time. I'll have a listen again and report back any suggestions that I can pull up.

No, that's cool for me to post here. Sometimes people want to be critiqued in private
for ego reasons and I was just trying to be sensitive to that possibility.

I have an assumption about your mixing and it could be mistaken but here goes:

Due to the saturation in the high frequencies, this sounds to me like you may have mixed it
at very high volumes or on a system that didn't reproduce highs very well. It sounds overly brittle to me.

The reason that I would guess that you mixed it at high volume is that frequently when we do that,
our ears get desensitized to treble frequencies.

Ears 'fatigue' when listening under lots of circumstances: under very high volume and for long periods of time
and under certain drugs. In the 80's I would have called this a 'cocaine' mix because one of the results of doing a lot
of coke and mixing at very high volumes was that people's ears became desensitized to treble frequencies and they
would keep turning it up in the mix.

This is why it is good to mix in shorter sessions and to use relatively low volumes during most of the mixing, occasionally
cranking it to make sure that the mix sounds good at higher volumes.

In a way, if you mix at low volumes and keep cross referencing it with higher volumes and with different mixtures of
subsonics being added or headphones, your ear gets trained to hear what something would sound like mixed at
lower volumes as it would sound turned up considerably. You also save your hearing.

I actually have all kinds of reduction of my upper midrange hearing (intelligibility) because of both playing very high volume
music on stage (right next to a loud bass player) and because of really loud monitoring situations.

There are producers from the 80's who were norotrious for their overly brittle mixes. Todd Rundgren was one of them
and when I heard a session once he produced for one of my good friend's bands I was just floored by the incredible volume he used
and it made sense. To this day , his mixes are uncomfortable for me to listen to.

The only other thing that I would critique is an aesthetic critique and may not be apropos given your style.
But I'll share it anyway.

I find that though it is fascinating to listen to with dozens and dozens of fascinating sonic events popping in and out of the mix, that I
long for more thematic material; more melody if you will...................or at least more elements that make it
have more of a distinct feel, musically, as opposed to a constantly evolving three ring circus of sound.

I think that sometimes, committment to a melody or theme is what makes a piece of music distinctive and makes it stand out
from other things. I think of something like Black Uhuru's 'Guess Who's Coming To Dinner' which is more of a classic
dub styled tune. That has a really distintive melody that anyone could sing back to you.

It's a new day of course and you may not have been wanting to go for such an aesthetic, but the singer songwriter
Lionel Ritchie, said that if he was ever unsure of whether a melody he was writing was as strong as the production of a recording he was working on , he would just whistle the melody and see if anyone responded.

I used the whistle test all the time on themes and/or parts. If it sounds good whistled, it'll sound good with bells and whistles added.

Nice work, despite everything I"ve said. Keep it up and keep sending us more.