Six years before prog-metal act Periphery issued their influential 2010 debut, guitarist-producer Misha Mansoor stumbled upon a "rumor" that would permanently alter his life path. "I had a gaming PC that had these quarter-inch inputs on it," he remembers. "It was right around the time I heard that you could record on a computer." Tracking guitar straight into the desktop, augmenting his riffs with realistic software drum sounds, he now had the ability to create demos by himself, at his own pace. "I didn't have to rely on anyone else," he says. "The world of music just opened up to me."
The young musician, a native of Bethesda, Maryland, had "no real aspirations of a music career." Instead, he was just writing for the thrill of discovery and community: In this pre-Facebook, pre-Soundcloud era, Mansoor used his early songs to connect with other like-minded musicians — making friends on forums dedicated to Swedish metal band Meshuggah and prog guitar icon John Petrucci. Emboldened by the camaraderie he found online, he started sharing his home recordings, which he'd uploaded to the early streaming site SoundClick under the moniker Bulb.
"It was like, 'Here's this new thing I discovered I could do, and I might as well share it,'" he recalls. "I remember being so nervous about it because I thought everything I did was fucking terrible. But I thought, 'I'll post it, and maybe if it gets ripped apart, I'll learn something or I just won't post anything ever again.' But people seemed to take really kindly to it, which encouraged me to keep posting."
By 2005, that same spark urged Mansoor to move his talents offline, recruiting an evolving crew of local musicians to help flesh out his dynamic compositions. By 2020, Periphery has recorded six albums of bombastic, expansive metal — weaving electronics, ambience, and sample-based orchestrations into a barrage of heavy riffs often described as "djent."
But even as that band exponentially expanded its following, touring with other metal giants like Between the Buried and Me and The Dillinger Escape Plan, Bulb never dimmed. Those exploratory early recordings, spanning everything from textural electronics-and-guitar pieces ("Absent") to quiet-loud/clean-distorted post-metal atmospheres ("Godma") to manic noise rock assaults ("F Your Cat") to classic djent ("Soul Crush," the first song he ever posted), started to build their own cult following — expanding beyond SoundClick to become a sort of treasure trove for the most rabid fans.
After watching these songs circulate at random for years on the Internet, Mansoor finally decided to reclaim his past: On June 12, 2020, via Periphery's 3DOT Recordings, he will release Bulb Archives: Volume 8, the first of 10 volumes collecting roughly 110 songs. With a new set arriving every two weeks, the project marks the first time all of this myriad music has been available officially, in one place, and through current, popular streaming platforms. Mansoor is relieved to finally present the package on his own terms.
Mansoor admits he thought about just letting the material stay a half-hidden secret. "I noticed people are trading around these songs," he says. "It's weird. People are asking about it. They're trading around Dropbox or Mediafire links of these things, like mixtapes of something. I'm like, 'Maybe it should be a little easier to get to this stuff.' I can curate and control it for some degree, rather than it be these random collections that float around. Now you don't have to have the super secret link and password or secret handshake."
The collection — assembled in a semi-chronological, partly random fashion — presents the songs almost entirely as they were on SoundClick, spruced with slightly with mastering from longtime Periphery collaborator Ermin Hamidovic. The engineer worked from the original MP3s — "not an ideal scenario," Mansoor admits. "The majority of these projects I don't think I could even open. I don't have the same plug-ins. That in and of itself would be such a crazy undertaking. In some cases, it might literally have been faster to just re-record."
But preservation is the point — there's no "touching up" of individual parts or added overdubs. This is Bulb in its purest form: Mansoor capturing lightning in a bottle and stashing it away. Some of the tracks are charmingly raw; on the other end of the spectrum are lavishly arranged, sample-built orchestral pieces, which glimmer like lost scores to the video games, like Final Fantasy, that inspired the guitarist in his youth.
In addition to making the music widely accessible, the project also serves another purpose: to help organize Mansoor's ideas moving forward, as he writes for himself, for Periphery, and his eventual debut solo LP. "The volumes will be things people have not heard," he says. "It will also be complimented by an official solo album, something where the intent is to have a coherent idea. But I'll also put out these volumes of archives of demos that would otherwise live in purgatory forever — even in they get adopted in another song, they have their own vibe and charm. Bulb is just the ether. It's just where things sit until something happens."
Over 15 years after his first Internet upload, having built a distinct brand with Periphery, Mansoor has gained enough perspective to appreciate the drive of that eager guitarist riffing away into his PC. "This door just opened up to me," he says of those early days. "However much I was willing to put into it, that's what I could get out of it. You just discover this path, and the reward is discovering where the path takes you."