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.
I spent four hours a day in the studio during the week, which I arrived at via a commute involving two separate buses. This new routine was quite a departure from my usual schedule of working from home according to my natural energy flow. But it was well worth the challenge of imposing a bit of temporary rigor on my habits.
I played my first live show of the year a couple of weeks ago. Fittingly, it happened on Friday the 13th at Verboden Festival, a 5-day goth bacchanal here in “Vancouver,” which so happened to culminate in a Scorpio eclipse. I played to a crowd of merry festivalgoers after 1am, opening up the witching hour festivities that went late into the night.
After several months of my live gear living on my bedroom desk, I finally packed it up in a rolling suitcase and took it down to my studio on the bus. This was precipitated not so much by the change in weather – although it’s quite a lot more comfortable in the studio these days, and the bathrooms have been thankfully renovated as well – but the need to actually hear what was going on outside of my headphones.
“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.
