A compilation release of mecha tracks meant to inhabit the same universe as my song "GEARSHIFT" from twofold's THE LOST MECHA TOOLS. Most of these tracks were drafted up almost immediately after I made "GEARSHIFT" in December 2021 because I was so amped on the style I had discovered for myself. I found it very difficult to apply the finishing touches necessary to get a bonafide release organized because the minimal yet expansive style required a lot of confidence in my "production chops," which I don't always have. Some songs I originally intended to put on here got left by the wayside as I convinced myself they wouldn't be "good enough" to make it, which is a bit silly in hindsight.

I still feel intimidated by this in the present day—when I take a listen back, I mostly hear mixing quirks and oddities I wish I had had the knowledge to resolve at the time. Objectively speaking, though, it's probably my best-produced work yet, and I'm proud of how much I was able to push the limits of my skillset. It's a big stepping stone to more speaker-oriented music in the future!

Part of Plaster Fe's Live & En Route compilation. This took some time to come out for a host of reasons—the actual tracks were made in about 2 weeks and sent off in May of 2023. I made a big effort to explore a more impressionistic, collage-forward style here, and it's an approach that I'd really like to expand into an album-length treatment someday. I already know what the album would be called, too . . .

One of my favorite things about this EP is how ramshackle it is—a zone of total "first thought, best thought," except when it came to "sun level." That track was an attempt at something that felt more in line with the Plaster Fe "house style" (as I perceive it)—all dubby and wubby and twiddly. I'm not entirely satisfied with the end result of that experiment, but everything else on this EP makes me pretty happy. This, in a way, feels closest to my platonic ideal of music. It sounds like the audio sketches I act out in my head when I'm bored.

It's difficult to remember if I was drawing from any specific artistic inspirations here, but I was probably thinking a lot about I Am Just A Pupil. Most of the track titles have to do with capillary actions, phloem, trees, coagulation, etc. except for "sun level," which is a phrase that had been stuck in my head since at least 2019.

A long-planned split release with my partner ODAE; things came together fairly serendipitously once I realized I had a nice EP-length collection of some crunchy dancey stuff finished at the same time that ODAE was making big strides with the timeline-scrubbing style of composition they explore here. I was inspired by the opposites-attract atmosphere of releases like the Mukqs | DJWWWW split from 2016, where two totally different sonic worlds are presented without an excess of commentary and it's up to the listener to devise a context that makes them belong together.

My last four tracks—"daisy" through "ecco"—were all completed around the same time, about February 2022, while "star" came about a few months later once I saw ODAE had 5 tracks for their half and I wanted our numbers to match. We got written about in Gabe Meier's old The Best Club Music on Bandcamp column, which was very gratifying.

This was also my first experience with distributing merch. We got some nice cassettes made via Cryptic Carousel, and while it was a bit of a pain to ship them around the world, it was very fun putting together the little envelopes with handwritten notes and stickers. I still have about 10 or so spares that I figured I could sell off at shows, but I haven't played a show in a hot minute, so maybe I should just throw them up on the Bandcamp page and finally clear out that inventory. Someday!

This was my first full-length release on another label (Plaster Fe), and I really appreciate the support of Morgan and PB there in designing the CD packaging and creating a few different music videos for me (one for "cassy" and one for "wish").

There are lots of interesting (to me, anyway!) stories to tell about this album, and at present it's the release of mine that I'm most proud of. Its development came out of the miscellany and refuse generated from experiments I created while developing my feature for Poison Damage's album Angel Is Calling; that material became the track "cutland," but making "cassy" was the first moment I realized I might have a cool album concept on my hands if I kept going.

Development, then, went from about August 2021 to March 2023. I worked with ODAE for the mastering (as always) and we came up with really fun ways of introducing additional color into the final product by adding strange reflections and resonance spikes. ODAE played back the album from a speaker in a room, then layered a recording of that speaker into each track that binaurally panned in response to the amplitude of the audio.

My longest release to date, expanding on and refining the crackly, low-fidelity "cardboard house" style I tried out on fun at the boardwalk! It all came together fairly quickly (within the span of about three months, total) and involved my most concerted promotional effort thus far, including a full press one-sheet that I wrote and designed all by myself but didn't actually end up sending to anyone (what a dummy!!). It did, at the least, result in the album being featured on Bandcamp's front page album recommendation carousel for a day, which was cool.

At the time of release, I was particularly proud of the closing track "off the ground," which was my first serious attempt at a deep-house kind of style driven primarily by subbass frequencies. Across the board, I put in a lot of effort on the production side to make an album that would (theoretically) sound good on club speakers and PA systems. I haven't been in a club where this was played yet, but if it ever happens, let me know if the album sounded good!

Probably the apex of that specific style of lossy bitcrushing I smothered all my music in between 2020-2021. I really adore this album's quirkiness and all of the strange risks I took to get an end product that fit my initial concept. It's also the reason I was able to play my first-ever live show at The End in Houston—your arms are my cocoon happened to stumble across it while trawling through releases on Bandcamp tagged "Houston" and invited me to open for one of their tour dates.

I was insanely nervous, kind of bungled my prep, and spent the entire set in an awkward, painful squat position behind my laptop at a folding table set up on the stage, barely looking at anyone in the crowd. I mumbled some inane banter at the mic about playing "computer music" before silently motoring through a bunch of pre-arranged tracks in my DAW (including two moth of the world demos!) that didn't sound much like no more tears at all. Everyone there who talked to me after the set was very nice and ODAE said the crowd was dancing a lot, so I guess I have to consider thw night a success. The general memory of it all is a little mortifying for me, though. Wait, what was I talking about, again?

Right! The album. Before its release, I made a tiny soundcloud mix of some of the artists I was listening to around the time of its creation—Pola, Tony Rainwater, YYU, AEGYOKILLER, Tatsuhiko Asano, et cetera. There are a lot of "EAT DIS" samples sprinkled throughout as homage to the album's origins in the EAT DIS label 2 hour challenges that were in full force around the time of creation.

The sister album to ANTARA and the tail end of a long, sustained period of experimentation fueled by COVID lockdowns. It was released in the spring and has some of that springtime sweetness in its DNA, but it's definitively a winter project in my mind; lots of frosty timbres and strange, shuddery noises, like something half-frozen unthawing itself and writhing its half-numb body across the floor. Many of these tracks were produced as part of a daily "journalling" process where I'd hock together a loop and record a quick live performance of it to send to my friends.

There are lots of fun barely-hidden samples obscured by the processing; "woolen" samples Puzzle's "Foghorn" and "the door closes and you are also the door" samples "Ternary Game" from one of my favorite games, 999. Everything's a little wiggly, awkward, and uneven; it was truly a dream to create so openly and without fear, and I think that brazen attitude is reflected in the end product. As an "era," I don't really enjoy revisiting it with today's ears, but I'll never forget how happy I felt when I was making these songs.

Freakish, kaleidoscopic, utterly rotted. Very important to me. Technically a "mixtape" (before I chilled out, I raised a mild stink on RateYourMusic about it not being classified as such), but mostly an exorcism of pent-up emotions and half-remembered influences (DJ Yo-Yo Dieting, especially). A landfill of glitching debris, pure data decay, so on and on. A lot of horrifyingly suboptimal choices made it all possible. Every song is nested in a giant 100+ track loop window in Bitwig Studio. I recorded the whole album live direct to Audacity from that project file in one delirious night in October 2020—I was literally falling asleep between track stops and starts, constantly losing place of where I was. There's some interesting compositional hypnagogia (in the literal sense!) that came out of that.

After I finished it, I was utterly convinced it would be my "big break" piece. That didn't turn out, but I have a very positive relationship with this album regardless. I'll never forget ANTARA. The weird "oscillating fan" texture that kind of coats the whole project is the result of forcing certain elements to be mono that really shouldn't have been.

A cute and fun collection of utterly shattered, bitcrushed dance tracks made by abusing Bitwig's native Amp plugin. A blast to make, but I don't remember much about the process beyond trying to channel a more sandblasted, personalized take on the nostalgic amateurishness of Hangin' At The Beach. I was playing a lot of Tales of Vesperia at the time, too, but I don't think that had anything to do with it. Will Toledo bought the album on Bandcamp when it came out and I have absolutely no idea how he found it. I should've messaged him!!

A small filedump rolled out somewhat perfunctorily to capitalize on the Bandcamp Friday craze of 2020. The title track is a good trial run for the longer-form improvisational suites on ANTARA. Despite its name, "soothe2" contains no instances of the iconic plugin and is instead a riff on Ico's "Heal."

A title-first production; with my fairly limited set of skills, I attempted to divine what a genre called "candle music" might sound like. The final result sounded (to me) like Yakui, so I ended up describing it as a "weightless" album without much understanding of that genre's history or its actual signifiers, which probably led to some funny confusion from enthusiasts on Bandcamp who were curious to check out the top-selling album in the genre (for a week or so!).

At this point I was experimenting a lot with form and had gotten into the (bad!!) habit of adding effects directly onto the master channel instead of individual tracks, which stuck with me for years; warping the whole product in one blunt stroke, rather than manipulating separate interlocking pieces. ODAE did me a solid by running the finished mix through their SP-404, which added some extremely aggressive analog-ish compression that gave the album a lurching, freakish aura. Sort of like a flickering candle!

Rendered as one long, continuous mix of various claggy hyper-bitcrushed "wasteland techno" tracks which technically have names (you can see them listed on the Bandcamp page) but all fall under the unified banner of "DOOMSCROLLING". I really like the cover art—I think it's one of the best covers I've made (it's an edit of a screengrab from Kintaro Walks Japan)—but the music itself feels gawky and amateurish to me in a way that I'm pretty uncomfortable with now. I've thought about deleting or privating the album on a few occasions, but I leave it up (for now) to keep myself honest, and to respect the past version of me who wanted to share it with the world. It's also fairly important as the first moment where I really embraced and explored different techniques of bitcrushing audio, which was fundamental to my timbral style for a long period and still influences me today.

A release I find interesting to look back on now as it pretty much sets a blueprint for some of my perennial fascinations; "awkward" loops and large tapestries of competing one-shot samples. After kicking off the secat project at the end of 2019, I wasn't sure what to do with myself; work was kicking my ass every day and I had messed around with dozens of ideas (including a neat trip-hop project I was going to call SUN LEVEL; observant readers will notice where I reused that title later) that fizzled out due to my inexperience and difficulties with managing "big," multilayered production.

After COVID lockdowns first started, I suddenly had a lot more time on my hands, and the introduction of Bandcamp Fridays in March 2020 had me thinking constantly about how I might be able to put something out and join in on the communal aspect it had taken on in those times. A week or two before May's Bandcamp Friday, I made the DETRITUS cover art under the assumption that I would be releasing an unthemed collection of loosies—you know, detritus!

Then, one day late in April, I listened to Eric Copeland's Hermaphrodite and was very inspired by it, particularly the track "Oreo"—I couldn't get it out of my head, and I decided I had to do something about it. Over the course of a few hours that same afternoon, I quickly assembled a whole suite of interesting little loops using a huge library of vinyl samples I had downloaded from a guy called "dave40"'s now-defunct website. I was so excited about what I had that I convinced myself I had to record it all THAT. VERY. NIGHT!!

And so I stayed up until 4 AM arranging every loop I had made into a full piece; I started out manually assembling them in Bitwig's session view, but about halfway through as I was getting more tired I just started directly recording me playing around with the loops into Audacity with very few post-hoc edits. It's funny and a little wistful looking back and seeing how much energy I had back then!

The connections I was able to start making on Twitter thanks to this album are what got me hooked into various music communities across the web, so I really have that single night (and, I guess, Eric Copeland) to thank for where I am now—that one burst of passion was able to animate my whole future as an artist.

So! Here we are at the beginning; I had made music under lots of different names since 2015, but this was the first official secat release, a grimey sticky techno-adjacent bag of treats. Before this, I made another secat album called ASTOR LES in the spring/summer of 2019 that I eventually decided against releasing; it was a long, long compilation of Fennesz-y, Endless Summer-type tracks that wasn't very good. ROUGH INTERSTELLAR MEMORY happened very quickly in a few weeks spanning from the end of November 2019 to the beginning of that December, and it's as much a "learning" project as it is an aesthetic statement—pretty rough around the edges, but ODAE did a nice job helping me out with the mixing and making it all sound much cooler than it had any right to. I'd like to think it's sloppy in a fun way.

I took tremendous inspiration from Imni by Yakui/Nondi_ when making this—that album had totally rocked my world and shifted my perspective earlier that fall. I couldn't stop thinking about it. This'll sound ridiculous, but I honestly never considered trying to make music that fast before Yakui showed me a way to do it that felt approachable to my influences and style of working. When ROUGH INTERSTELLAR MEMORY came out, I sent it to Yakui on Twitter, and she was very sweet and complimentary about it. That moment really kept me going and feeling like I could have a place in music. I can't thank her enough for that.

Below is a long, non-exhaustive list of features, collabs, edits, mixes, remixes, etc. etc. that I have done, in reverse chronological order. Chow down, piggy!!