march 04, 2018 07:26 pm

last night i sat down with my casio sk-5 and started messing around. looping beats, creating melodies from the little samples i had stored in it. i didn't expect anything to come out of it, but before i knew it a song started falling out of me. by your side is about being agoraphobic and in a long distance relationship. i think it's a very sweet recording, maybe you'll like it too. 

see myself in a screen
wasting days, counting weeks
getting more familiar with how you speak
while you're away from me
but i don't want to say goodbye
because it's safer when i'm by your side
i want to be near you
like i'm meant to

but hey
i think it's going to be alright
when we're sleeping and i'm by your side
i want to learn to fly
but it's safer when i stay inside

i want you
but the monster
won't let me
escape here

january 22, 2018 12:43 am

the oven heats up too slowly. this makes planning meals more difficult than it needs to be. thinking ahead, doing math, guessing how hungry i'll be by the time it finally reaches 400 degrees. i think it might be broken because when i turn it on i can smell gas all the way upstairs while i'm working. how long has it been? i check the clock constantly. time passes differently when you're this tired.

i didn't sleep very much last night, only managing to collect a few scattered hours. but, despite all of that, today was mostly good. it was one of those days that trailed on quietly, lead onward by lingering footsteps and foggy thoughts. moving forward at such a careful pace that it was almost as if it hadn't been moving forward at all. before long you wonder how it got to be so dark and why it is you haven't eaten. it's because the oven heats up too slowly.

nothing happened today but i did more than i thought that i would. i cleaned and put in the laundry and assembled packages. in between, i took out my camera. click, another shot. another part of my life, documented and shared. click, another piece of myself, given away to anyone who will have me. raising the viewfinder to my eye, i see something beautiful and try my best to capture it. i'm convinced that life is safer here, inside of this little box. but that's a thought that i'm not supposed to have anymore.

lately i've been thinking about the early days of existing as an artist on the internet. there was this website called cllct that was kind of like bandcamp but much smaller and more community based. bandcamp for bedroom artists. we sat there, creating music in our homes and sharing it with one another. nobody was worried about stream revenue or album sales. those were concepts too out of reach for us at that point. we were just creating things.

toward the end of its lifespan, flatsound was one of the top artists on the website. at the age of eighteen, i truly considered this to be the pinnacle of indie musicianship. sometimes i would go to the popular artists page and just stare at it. the feeling was so particular. tonight i looked at the old website via the wayback machine. most of the pages were still there, dated and archived, with missing pieces in their structure like gaps in a memory. every broken image existed as a test. do you really remember what was here? i swear i do. i clicked the popular artists page. there they were, artist that i used to interact with almost ten years ago, frozen in time. people that i hadn't thought of in years but had never forgotten. among them was my old profile. i stared at it for a minute. it still felt the same. 

i want things to feel like that again, i just don't know how to make it happen. not being on social media helps, and as a result i feel like i've been having deeper connections with people one-on-one. speaking to them on the phone rather than via text. i've been stripping down my website so that it feels more bleak. there's no longer a picture of me on the about page, and the only contact information is a physical address. i think that this is good. i think that sometimes the best way to add to something is to take away from it. i want to write people letters. i want to interact with them in a way that isn't for anyone else. i don't want this all to feel so passive. i just want things to feel special. i think the world needs that right now. 

december 11, 2017 06:26 am

to start things off, heat death is now on spotify. for those of you who still don't know, christian and i have a music project called wishing and a little over a month ago we released our second album. it was uploaded on halloween but has since been remastered by the incredibly talented jesse cannon. so go give it a listen, it sounds better than ever. 

speaking of wishing, have you seen the vinyl we had made of our first album, to forget? it's beautiful and pink and available right here. 

next order of business...sleep is back on vinyl!! that's right, second pressing baby! god, i don't even want to admit how privately excited i've been about this. like, finally. my most popular album, released in a way that i feel does it justice. don't get me wrong, the first pressing of sleep was great and i appreciate the label that released it before i was able to make it happen on my own. but, i mean, now that i am able to do it on my own? let's really do it.

double lp gatefold with lyrics from the album on the inside panel. the records are an a side / b side opaque mix of cream and gold and each held in a black paper sleeve. they're limited to 500, want to own one? click here.

alright, the last thing that i want to talk about is kind of a big one. to me it is, anyway. it's big because, despite what anyone tells me, i know that this will genuinely disappoint some people. at the risk of dragging this out too much, here it is - i'm taking a big step back from social media. not just platforms like twitter, but the many other means of directly communicating with me that i've kept so open to the public. for years i've allowed perfect strangers to come into my personal space and i guess what's happened is that it's finally reached a tipping point. the uncomfortable closing of gentle.earth made me take a step back and really consider how much of myself i was actually okay with giving to other people.

i have a lot of things to say about all of this. not necessarily about my interaction with people, but the toxicity of social media and the role it plays in my life as an online based artist. i'll get into it all more in detail the next time i do a radio broadcast but for now i can easily sum it up with, "it just doesn't make me happy like it used to". the environment, the community, the likes. none of it interests me anymore.

with that in mind, i am currently trying a new thing. a place for me to continue sharing pieces of myself periodically throughout the day. a place without likes or retweets. a place where i can post these very vulnerable aspects of my life without that awful thread of people i've never even met forming beneath it, all trying to be funny or make it about themselves. if anyone out there is still interested in what i may be doing or thinking at any given point in the day...go to the picture of me on my about page and click it. this is for the core fans. i'm still here, it just isn't for them anymore.

thank you for everything. for listening to the songs that i record, and for even caring enough about my life that you're reading these words right now. i'll talk to you soon. maybe in another long winded blog post, or in the next newsletter, or during the next broadcast. but in the moments in between, just know that i'm working harder than i have in a long time. not just on my songs, but on myself. thank you again.

november 25, 2017 06:35 pm

i don't have a lot to say about this song other than i recorded it earlier this year and never uploaded it. it was recorded on a zoom r16 multitrack recorder in my bedroom and, if you like it, you can have it for free. as always, thank you for listening.

forty seven pictures in a text
to remind me of the ones inside my head
a simple plan for complicated friends
i promise that i'll be fine in the end
but i think it would destroy you
wouldn't it?

i haven't stopped thinking of what you said
you don't know how much i want to be with you again
but i think it would destroy you
i'm so scared i'll destroy you
and i don't want to destroy you
what if it destroys you like it used to
this would destroy you
wouldn't it?

june 17, 2017 01:59 am

the radio feels good. it's always felt good. not just as something to listen to while going through the comfortable motions of your every day life, but something else. something bigger. something that's always happening, at all times, in different parts of the world. something that's always been there. 

radio, even internet radio, is very old technology to me. it's been around for most of my life and has never really caught much of my attention. i'm twenty six and a few days ago i had no idea what a stream port or a shoutcast server was, but learning it felt very intuitive and exciting to me. that's the thing about discovery. it doesn't matter how old something is, when you immerse yourself in it for the first time it has no choice but to feel new. and i think that's what i need right now. something new. something to be excited about. so that's what i did, i immersed myself in it. i became excited.

three days of no sleep later and i did it. flatsound radio is up and running and it's beautiful. it really is beautiful to me. sometimes it's christian and i talking late at night in a skype call, other times it's just me creating live soundscapes. sometimes i broadcast the sound of birds outside of my bedroom window for two hours. this feels so much more real than other live platforms. there isn't a likes system, or a chatroom trying to compete with itself. it's just me. talking and creating art. exposing parts of myself to something that feels bigger and emptier than i do. i've spent so much of my career completely enamored by the concept of the void. throwing the most genuine parts of myself out into nothingness. this is the purest representation of that. 

other than that...things have been an odd mixture of good and bad. trust me, i realize as i'm typing this just how typical that is to say. it effectively sums up the life of every person that i've ever met. it encompasses how i've felt at any given time, ever since i was old enough to take a step back and honestly consider how it is that i've been doing. i guess the only thing different is that i referred to it as "odd", and the only thing odd about it is that i've been handling it well. 

last wednesday i spoke to my therapist, as i do every wednesday from 3:30 to 4:30pm. only this time, in the midst of all that i had to tell him, he stopped me mid-sentence and told me with a very comforting sense of confidence that i was doing it. that i was getting better. that everything happening in my life, and how i'm choosing to respond to it all, is what recovery looks like.  i know that he's right, but even that scares me. 

i think that's the point, though. i think that allowing it to scare me is part of the recovery too. or, at very least, it's a good opportunity to ask yourself an important question. are you afraid, or are you excited? i think i'm excited.