Smashing Pumpkins to give away new, sprawling album

Yesterday Billy Corgan announced on smashingpumpkins.com that he will release a 44-track opus based on the tarot dubbed Teargarden By Kaleidyscope. Further, the perpetually goofier shredder-songwriter plans to give it all away for free via the Web one track at a time, starting sometime "around Halloween."

After all 44 tracks have been unleashed to the Internet, physical copies will be available for collectors.

Work on the record began only yesterday, but Corgan has 53 songs lined up. Somewhat encouragingly, he promises the new material "harkens back to the original psychedelic roots of The Smashing Pumpkins: atmospheric, melodic, heavy, and pretty." But without the original members, of course. This will be the first album to feature recent Pumpkin recruit Mike Byrne on drums. Audio geeks can follow the studio process on this blog. Looks like they're using analog gear, which is nice.