#1

today I’m sharing the first peek at a kind of music I’ve been imagining since I was 15. since that age I’ve been a using field recorder and a camera to spontaneously/arbitrarily capture pieces of my day and all the while I’ve been thinking about what that means.

this is
6 years of places felt
homes and empty rooms
lots of things that I forgot

glimpses of minutes I held onto
for no particular reason
growing up / finding home

‘transistion spaces’ was released today during bandcamp’s revenue sharing efforts, and in a few months I’ll be popping back into this thread to share the full-length tape release which follows the same path but iterates deeper.

*

for about as long as I can remember I’ve sheltered some kind of unconveyable anxiety about the passage of time and one of the most calming things for me is creating records. whether it’s capturing the sound of a room I left behind, the weather on a particular day, temporary arrangements in my neighborhood, or fleeting gestures made by hand, creating a permanent imprint via art brings me a lot of stability.

I thought of the title ‘transistion spaces’ when I was in my last year of high school & thinking about the temporary experience of home as I was moving away from my parents place in a small american midwestern town to a building in chicago. since then I’ve moved through temporary living arrangements in urban neighborhoods I hold dearly and now a similar sense of apprehension and optimism returns with the opportunity to graduate college and relocate to another city.

as a person who sees the world very differently I have a hard time finding home - these songs are about some of those attempts <3

(following @glia’s lead I’m gonna pop back in to this thread here and there between releases and process notes about how these songs and images were made)

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#2

it’s really good you make.

yes thank you !

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#3

I love this.

We haven’t met.
I haven’t been to Chicago, nor the Midwest.
But now that I know there are videos / images, my brain somehow creates them when I listen to this.

Thank you.

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#4

This is wonderful! Thanks a lot for sharing.

I’d be very interested in hearing more about the production process

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#5

been listening to these lately and just love thinking about the spaces and memories attached

thank you for sharing

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#6

I’ve always really loved the feeling I get from checking out releases on this forum — it’s never a case of jealousy (though here, I think we’d have every reason), or of the fear of having someone execute an idea before you (though I was indeed hoping to one day make an autobiographically-structured ambient album using field recordings).

What it is instead is feeling so profoundly encouraged by others’ work, and seeing in it possibilities that I hadn’t considered before, and knowing that the work we do takes place in a coherent tradition that we get to build ourselves.

So, thanks! This is a great project.

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#7

really really really high praise @zuliani @pfig @glia - it means so much to me that ppl are digging into the work like this

to your point @zuliani this not at all original concept (see marcus fischer, andrew tasselmyer, kate carr, josh mason, ezikiel honing, etc etc). there are just so many magical things about recording sound and I took cues from so many artists before me to arrive at the approach here.

I thought about not making music after I found yuichiro fujimoto’s work

there’s an incredible purity in this artist’s take on the idea. you’re just right there with them in these incredibly perfect moments.

the field recordings I have mean a lot to me but I think there’s only a handful that are strong enough on their own to feel to others the way they feel to me. so I took that as a cue to head in the opposite direction - layer ALL of the moments and find some synergies. which got me thinking about the time dimension (which was already well at play in the software I was making).

this song was was kind of the clicking point (about a year ago now) and the rest got finished later on. this track is also a perfect loop.

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#8

@DuellingAnts here are those process notes I’ve been promising : )

in all 3 (?) releases I’m using this thread for there were kind of two stages of revision that happened at different times. theres a “seed” improv session that generally sits on my hard drive unnoticed for a while before I dig it up and pair it with one or more field recordings and process both of those layers. this is also the point where I find meaning and sometimes a name. tools-wise it’s all piano/guitar, ableton, prosody, monome grids, and a midi knob box (nakedboards mc-24, which I broke on tour).

for transition spaces all of the seeds cover about 2 days, 2 different setups, and probably only a few hours

two minutes for my home, one minute for betweens, two minutes for crystal:

acoustic guitar, synecdoche + operator > colloquial > some combo of crap cassete emulator, this random filter device, alliterate > anaphora

the whistling in the background of this track is a bird in the pitched-down field recording, which just happed to harmonize with the guitar parts when I layered them. that’s kinda the synergy stuff I was talking about (* magic happens *).

storage unit afternoon, stephan mac, far north thrift store, orange line, dining room table, post mortem resume, humbert humboldt fruiteria:

synecdoche > switchable instrument rack of operator, drum rack with my piano mutisampled, simpler with a piano sample > colloquial > alliterate > anaphora

the second stage of processing for all of these probably included dirge, assonance, and hospital_food along with plenty of compression, side-chaining, and eq to bring out certain frequencies and dynamics

happy 2 answer further q’s !

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#9

Thanks for this! I find your process very interesting and inspiring.
I’m also a big fan of your Prosody collection and use them all the time

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#10

Wow…just found this. I thought your work on Prosody was amazing and I would probably have bought this anyway but it is great. I bought Raw and 0.5 as well because they are possibly even better. Thanks.

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#11

sharing some details about the visual art for ts today

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this was kind of a practice project / studio experiment compiled a few months before I recorded the audio seeds. the bottom layer is an inkjet print with some randomly selected photos (they ended up being a mix from the two neighborhoods in chicago that I lived in which is probably why I chose this print for this album). on top of the pics there’s a black layer of vectors that were traced from the photos in the print and some other places surrounding the location, scrambled up in adobe illustrator, and screen printed on top of the inkjet print. the blue layer was printed from a silkscreen that I exposed with a bunch of different brush marks photoshopped out of some painting experiments from a year before which was printed improvisationally to get a unique arrangement on every impression. here’s some bad scans of other outtakes:

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I also used a painted one of these for the ‘raw’ cover

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tomorrow only I’m going to be adding a bunch of unreleased music to the album while bandcamp is waiving their fees. if you’re crazy, you can even purchase the album a second time. I’ll post here when that is avail. much love ! <3 <3

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#12

ahhhhh!!! i love hearing all of this insider stuff about your processes in both the recordings + the visual work!

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#13

wow @andrew. this is absolutely wonderful. I really connected to the idea before listening, but the end result is hitting home even harder. very inspirational. thank you for sharing.

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#14

Thank, this is so good - really feels like an integral part of the album.