Billy Corgan Releasing Limited Edition ‘Experimental’ Album ‘AEGEA’
Two weeks after announcing the release of two albums in 2015, Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan revealed a separate, more experimental album called AEGEA has been recorded and will be released in six to eight weeks.
Recorded in 2007, the two-record set will only initially be pressed in a set of 250 vinyl copies, each one “hand-numbered and annotated” by Corgan himself and sold for $60.
“As a work, AEGEA is experimental in nature, and comes across as more a soundtrack to some lost foreign film than the kind of music I’m usually associated with,” Corgan said on his website. “Listening back I quite like how AEGEA goes along, as it has qualities that are both meditative and alien; but not alienating.”
The release of the six-year-old album should act as a stopgap while the group records new material for upcoming albums Monuments to an Elegy and Day for Night. The band began recording sessions for those albums two weeks ago, with Corgan noting that most of the songs had already been written and were ready to record. “For those interested in sound, think: ‘guitars, guitars, guitars, and more guitars,'” Corgan wrote, “but more so on the epic side of things than, say, grossly metallic.” The albums will be produced by Howard Willing, who started working with the band on their 1998 album, Adore.
Fans can follow the recording process on the band’s new website, The Panopticon, where Corgan said they’ll post “song titles, lyrics, poetic impressions, pictures, sound clips, studio gear and the like offered for a circuitous, bird’s eye view of the process as it unfolds.” Corgan wrote that the new site will “better address the speed of modern life” through “its simplicity.”