It’s a bit annoying to carry gear on the metro each time, and it doesn’t feel like I’m doing much in the moment, but cumulatively, rehearsing makes me feel more connected to performing than I would if I was just working on my desk at home.

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.

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.

Although I haven’t spent much time in my actual studio this month (after a rough winter, the mere thought of the place conjures up memories of freezing air and stinky toilets), my gear has been getting a fair bit of play while set up cozily in my bedroom.

Something I’ve been thinking about lately is how my approach to performance has evolved. I’m a self-taught musician. Although I was in the school orchestra for a few years and have taken classes here and there as an adult to brush up on specific skills, I didn’t have a formal or professional training in music.

“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.

The title of the mix is a reference to my fav story by (Vancouver resident) William Gibson, about a cyborg artist who creates albums with their mind.

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.

As the first month of the year comes to a close, I woke up this morning feeling optimistic. It’s been just over two months since I played my first live show as Reliquary V. The next show on my horizon is in May and I had decided to write a new album in the interim.