renouncement

In the weeks leading up to Isaac's birth, I took stock of the music I had made and decided it was enough.

There were loose ends though. I still hadn't finished the third part of the Long trilogy, and I had piano tracks that I recorded a year earlier for an urgent expression that I had completely lost motivation to complete. I also wondered sometimes if I should have made more urgent expressions about my relationship with Ale.

By the way, "urgent expression" is a technical term. I'll explain.

My work roughly divides into two types of productions: electronic and acoustic. Electronic productions begin as songs written in an acoustic environment (i.e., on a piano) and are subsequently re-conceived as works produced with numerous electronic elements. Piano passages might be retained, but notes that constitute single chords might be broken down into separate virtual instruments. Tracks might then undergo extensive processing, and various drum machines will be added to create some degree of danceability. A good example of an electronic production that retains some of its piano feel is "Redline":

Conversely, an example of one that has every acoustic element transformed into an electronic element is "Critical":

The first half of "Dawn Chorus" sounds a bit like what I wrote on the piano, but the second half is entirely electronic and has little connection to its original incarnation. 

But the process of creating these electronic productions is time-consuming. "Critical", from the Idle album, was written in 2008 but not actually released until May 2017. By the time Idle was released, the songs that constitute it had virtually no relevance to my current emotional state. Idle is about being unsure of how to interact with the society around me, but by 2017 I had become a fully functional adult, with a career, homeownership, and a marriage. Idle represented a technical achievement, but its release provided little cathartic fulfillment, as it did not directly reflect what I was feeling at the time of its completion. This remains to be the case for all of the electronic productions I produce, including the EPs Fall (2018), Lost (2020), and Circumcision (2022), all of which include songs written between April 2017 and August 2018. I'm proud of these, but they take a long time to make, and because of that, there's an existential disconnect between the person that writes them and the person that produces and publishes them.

My acoustic productions solve this problem. I began writing them toward the end of August 2018, when I was subject to experiences that inspired me to write songs faster than I could produce them. The first was "I Can't Lose You Again," a song that was written in less than an hour. I wanted to begin a new production process that would allow me to publish songs faster, while they were still "fresh." So I began to create acoustic productions, each labeled as an "urgent expression," a concept that prioritized speed over quality in production. They also sounded more like what it's like to be in the room with me when I'm playing at home, another element that is lost in the process of reconception as an electronic production. The urgent expressions thus provide me with a more cathartic experience and the listener with a more authentic one.

To ensure consistent output, I created rules for myself to follow:

(1) each urgent expression must consist of two pieces (in effect, each urgent expression is a 2-track EP);

(2) one piece must be a song, i.e., a piece of music that includes vocals and is written with a more conventional song structure;

(3) one piece must be an instrumental, a more free-flowing piece that has some structure but allows for a significant degree of improvisation;

(4) a poem must be written and serve as a textual counterpart to the instrumental, which must appear where lyrics would appear if it were a conventional song (e.g., on Bandcamp, the poem is found by clicking on the "lyrics" link beside the track title; if artwork is created and lyrics are presented, the poem must appear as if they were the lyrics of that song);

(5) the title of the EP must be the same name as the instrumental;

(6) each piece may have some electronic embellishment, but must not be overly saturated, which was achieved by setting time limits on how long I allowed myself to spend working on it (usually about a week).

I followed these rules and typically would not spend more than a month producing them. This time includes recording, editing, and mixing. The first five urgent expressions were released on the last Thursday of every month from November 2018 to March 2019, respectively. This resulted in 10 original pieces, adding up to about 41 minutes of music. Some of my favourite compositions are within this series: "I Can't Lose You Again", "Just Look Around," "Superficial Fascination," and "Elegy," an instrumental my late grandmother asked me to play for her a second time.

So with these productions, I got more done, and they gave me a greater sense of artistic achievement, instead of a mere technical one.

I continued to work on both types of productions. I began working on the electronic production Lost in 2019 (the first part of the Long trilogy), and after I met Alexandra, who would eventually become the mother of my child, I used the urgent expression format to express some of the immediate feelings of falling in love and finding who I thought was the perfect person for me. Three urgent expressions came from these feelings: Momentum, Places I Shouldn't Be, and Restoration, all of which, again, released respectively in each month from May to July of 2020. Restoration was so titled because I felt I had come full circle, having experienced a sudden end to my first marriage, a subsequent sense of confusion, desperation, and isolation, a reestablishment of a healthy social life, and a new love. Restoration seemed to appropriately punctuate a period that was, though turbulent at times, ultimately a success, proof I could triumph over adversity. Originally I thought I might try for a run of five urgent expressions in total, but once Restoration was complete, I was happy with three. I did from time to time wonder if I had more in me to produce. The last time I did a run of urgent expressions, I managed to produce five (10 songs). In this case, with only three (6 songs), I felt sometimes that there was an asymmetry; that my devotion to Ale should reflect itself in at least an equal number of urgent expressions that I produced before. But music is the solution to problems that I simply did not have at this point in my life anymore. She loved me. And she showed me all the time. Nothing needed urgent expressing. I was at peace.

So when we were expecting our first child, I was comfortable with the idea of a sort of retirement from my music, at least in the form of these production styles.

But yeah. The loose ends. Shortly before I met Ale in August 2019, I had been fiddling around with a melody for a song called "The Beast Is Only Sleeping," a sort of spiritual follow-up to the original five urgent expressions. In 2022, I eventually got around to recording piano tracks for this song along with an instrumental for what would be the ninth urgent expression. I decided that, before Isaac was born, I would record vocals for the song, mix the tracks, and release them. Sound Asleep was published on April 9, 2023, only thirteen days before Isaac was born. The final installment in the Long trilogy had been permanently shelved.

So I was done. And I was happy with that.

This concludes the story of the first time I decided to discontinue my music, but it should be stated here that this renouncement did not last. Ale was diagnosed with terminal cancer and died shortly afterward. The conditions of existence underwent dramatic, terrible changes. But the framework I described above seemed untouched by the evil surrounding me, and the prospect of producing more urgent expressions to express my anguish provided solace. I had three urgent expressions about Ale; producing three more for her after her death became a theological vocation.

I have since produced these, and other songs have been written. The Long trilogy will be completed. More music is coming. I would never stop now.