Somehow it’s been over a year and a half since I wrote anything here.
Since my last update, I’ve moved to Montréal, played seven shows (which I’ll recap in another post), and released two tracks. Here’s some back story on these, which I somehow neglected to fully share across the sprawl of my instagram, substack, and mailing list ~
Earlier this month, I wrapped up my residency at Lobe Studio, where I spent a total of 80 hours across June and July. I went into the residency knowing a bit about 4DSOUND, the holographic sound technology that Lobe is dedicated to, having attended an info session and a performance there previously. But the experience of working independently in the space for so long was irreplaceable in terms of tuning my perception and thinking about spatial sound.
13 years ago, a much younger version of myself played a show at a friend’s apartment in what was formerly East Berlin. I don’t remember a lot of details. There was a small PA on the balcony, which I plugged my ipod and microphone into. I stood on some piece of furniture to raise myself a bit higher above the small crowd of friends who had gathered for the performance.
“Vision and vibe” are obviously foundational, but I struggled to think in those terms sometimes when I was writing music in the past. I found the writing process itself to be so challenging that I often couldn’t really spread my creative wings and consider the overall concept, or feel a sense of competence when it came to fine-tuning certain elements.
Last night I had an epiphany that was a surprisingly long time coming. I'd been going through the previously-mentioned process of tracking demos, and the way I was doing it was sending each instrument straight into the computer, to get a totally dry recording of each that I planned to later mix and layer with effects and so forth. And it sounded, if not awful, just wrong.
In December 2021, I released Dematerialize, an album of electronic poetry that I’d been working on for the past several years. The recording was made available in cassette and digital form by New York City tape label Soap Library.
