rew and way (2014) - The name has no meaning but is rather just the first two sounds that came into my head as I saved the file. I was living alone on Cape Cod and trying to make as much music as I could. Overt time I grew frustrated as the songs I was making all started to sound too similar to one another and felt as though they were lacking something, though I didn’t know what. One night, after becoming particularly frustrated and feeling uncreative, I stepped outside into the night air with Rosie (my cat at the time) to breathe. I told myself that the next thing I was to record I would keep, unaltered, and work from. That guitar riff was the first thing that came about after pressing record. I worked from there. The bass is pitched down acoustic guitar, the percussion is chairs (a recurring theme in my music) and the “singing” is my digital manipulated voice.
The samples are taken from guide relaxation and mediation record from the late 60s. I happened to stumble across it at a record store and knew that was something special.

theapology (2014)- This song was made in the summer of 2014 which was perhaps the peak of me being into The Books. The guitar was recorded with a capo on the 7th or 8th fret but then digitally tuned down to an open tuning again. The resonance that this “fake bass” brought about was something I really liked.
The samples are from various people found on archive.org all reading “The Apology” by Ralph Waldo Emerson. I loved the idea of a phrase being repeated over and over, each time losing its meaning a bit more and becoming just sound. The difference in tone that each speakers voice brings with it really help to dissolve the phrase. To my ears, it began to sound like “theapology,” the study of something, who knows what. Like reading off the course list for a made-up school. 
There is also something to be said about repeated apologies. When does meaning start to drift away? Or what is causing one to feel the need to repeat themselves?

a maze (2015)- I wrote this song in 2015 after a long day of longing. It was me letting myself be slightly melodramatic and to be taken away by a feeling ; to really embrace a singular moment and the complex emotions that reside within it. 
It is two electric guitar tracks - one played through a Roland sp404’s octave effect, the other manipulated via a strange patch I found online. The sp404’s octave effect isn’t great at tracking polyphony and distorts in an interesting way as notes overlap one another.


a song about streetlights, a hill, and a pond or a lake (2015) - I wrote the chord progression first and then improvised the lyrics while writing. Almost all of the words remain unchanged from their original stream of consciousness beginnings. I often struggle to mix my writing and my music together - they often feel very disjointed to me unless they form at the same time. This is one of the rare cases where both came about in one sitting.
This version was recorded in 2020. The main guitar bits were recorded in Japan using a nylon string. The vocal/steel string track was recorded in Cape Cod.

ornithology (2016) - I borrowed my friend Adam’s 4-track cassette recorder and was making some experiments. My dear friend Sarah joined me for a session and provided their vocals to this backdrop I had made. The vocals were run though a tremolo pedal with a fluctuating depth and tremolo rate and then through reverb. I later sampled this song for “a mouth drought.”


a sad fact of the matter (2016) -
This song was recorded in the late winter of 2016 while looking out a window onto the snow. It features two recordings from 2014 - My friend Joanna reading a German children’s story in Ireland, and a man on the second level of a bus in London preaching to a dozen or so drunk university students about how Jesus loves us. The title meant nothing at the time other than just a fun play-on-words that came to me in the moment.
It is primarily acoustic guitar played through a delay patch on the organelle by Critter and Guitari. The patch would only be active while pressing the auxiliary button by hand. I would play a chord and then with my right hand press the button and manipulate the timing. It was a janky set up but the outcome was interesting, I think.


stairwells (2016-2017?)
I don’t remember making this very well. I remember thinking about the stairwell my bedroom my senior year of college. I remember making the rhythm. I remember playing the 12-string. 



chamomile. (2016-2017?) The percussion on this track was made from samples of wooden chairs recorded in 2015 in Syracuse, NY and Harwich, MA. An interstate chair collaboration. That particular loop sat on the sp404 for a while and was used to write a lot of other songs. It is also used in one part of “mugs” off of the 2018 birdfeeders release. The spoken sample used is taken from a documentary about hummingbirds. The vocal sample is from Ikema Yuko, a Japanese singer/songwriter whose music I highly recommend.
I wanted this song to feel like you are unsure or confused but then suddenly overtaken by something warm and comfortable, even if still slightly uncertain. It was originally much longer and drawn out with nothing really changing, I just kept the loops going as I enjoyed being washed away it. But upon reflection, it got a bit stale. Here it is every so slightly trimmed down.
The name is because chamomile is delicious and nice.




Special thanks to my dear friend Matt. Thank you for always listening to every iteration of my music over the years, providing feedback, encouraging me, and doing the mastering and mixing things I am unable to do. Thanks, friend.

And special thanks to you.
Thank, you