Ambient

If you were to catch someone in the most raw, primal, base level of their soul, you'll find a naked, unadorned fear of being alone. We're all afraid of going through our lives siloed, channeled, and shuttled away from others, afraid of not being understood, afraid of dying alone. This song is an admission of that fear. Read more about Best Laid Plans

Sometimes you need that dark, empty downtown street. Sometimes you need to see the silent pulse of yellow lights down the avenue. To hear the breeze interrupted by the distant noise of a far away car. To be the eye watching, the soul feeling the immediacy of existing in the now with no other demands. To take solace in the distance of the world. This song is in the heart of that need.

My years of playing both bass and accompaniment on the Yamaha PSS-470 with one patch at a time paid off. The low-fidelity crackle of this solo instrument was caught in the immediacy of one take. Written in 2000, during a period of high creativity, I was feeling a melody one night and went with it. Pressed record. No metronome, no time keeping, no MIDI. When I reached the emotional end, I listened to what just happened and knew I had something to keep. Read more about Solace

"Come with me to the shores of Tripoli." The phrase means nothing, but it rolls off the tongue smoothly. Evokes a call for companionship. A beach campfire at night. An assault on a foreign shore. A troubled love. A redemption.

This is an exercise in accidents and iterations. The experiment of chaos in the middle of layers of polish. It started with the trilled snares, an homage to drum and bass. That was the genesis seed. Then I hammered the arpeggio on my Yamaha PSS-470. Looped it, added more. Each layer was a response to a hole in the sound, a hole whose shape demanded the shape to be filled with. I heard the flute in the overtones, so I added flute, filtered through an "alpha wave generator". I heard the bassline in the rhythm, so I added the rolling bassline, mixed dry and edible. Read more about Tripoli

In my school years, I travelled a lot, usually along state highways and rural roads. At night in the country, it gets so dark that you can see thousands of stars among the black, and you can track your movement in spacetime by the domes of light suspended over nearby towns. I'd sit in the back of the van or car and watch the sky, my mind drifting out across the hills as I imagine in wonder if there was someone looking back at me.

When I wrote this song, I set out with no design or plan. What I found was a highly organic process of sounds discovering themselves, layers spontaneously being born because they demand it. I looked into the black and found harmonies, navigated by the domes of rhythm and the swells of elevating dreams. Upon first listen of this song in its rough mix, I felt the elation of being the young kid looking up and thinking big. No matter where I went, there were the stars, one of the few constants in my life. Read more about Stars In the Window