New (old) Music

 Ah, the start of a new year. Rife with optimism for what adventures all of these months of days may bring. Fresh as clean sheets, crisp as a new peice of paper, and clear as a mountain stream. There's no better time to stop sitting on tons of old music I have had lingering on hard drives for literal decades now and usher them off into the void. Perhaps they will find their way into the hearts and minds of such individuals that will enjoy them and use them as intended. Here are a couple for your listening pleasure: 

Air Guitar was a brief project with my childhood best friend where we were experimenting with guitars, synths, and samplers, figuring out how to make music with these tools. We only ever recorded two songs with a four track tape machine under this moniker with plans for more, but we were ultimately distracted by other musical projects and never returned to finish anything else. I found these songs mixed down on a tape from those days and attempted to clean them up as best as I could. The patina embued by the medium has a distinct charm to it, in my humble opinion.

Cry Radio was another short lived project started with a girlfriend in late 2000. We were a five piece band for a couple performances, but when it came time to record I seemed to be the only person around (besides my then girlfriend that contributed lyrics for a song and vocals on a couple). I wish it had included the other band mambers in the recording process, but it didn't last very long as everyone was quickly moving in other directions. It kind of disintegrated before I could really make sessions happen. As a result it ended up being pretty much just me to play and record all of it.

There's also a new Hifi Envelope album I'm releasing on the anniversary of my mother's passing, February 9th, 2025.

Upon clearing out my late mother’s home

I exist in that space between 

Holding it together 

And all out weeping

Like the formlessness 

Of liquid 

Filling in the cracks and crevices

Seeping

Seamlessly from one 

Moment to the next

Circling the drain 

In the synapses of my brain

Searching my heart

Before time tears it apart

And I acquiesce to the 

God of nothing 

Having served no greater

Good or purpose 

Than the dust that catches 

The light as it floats

Through the silence of your room

On a weekday morning

Wounds of Death

 

Her death reopened 

My wounds of displacement 

We’ll never speak again

There can be no replacement 

For good or for bad

the ones that had made you

At their hands you had suffered 

And that pain it had shaped you

Now I lie in dark rooms

With a lump in my throat 

Harder to swallow

Harder to cope

And though it makes little sense 

I feel compelled to hide this pain

To continue to mourn someone 

Full of guilt and full of shame 

I long for the windy nights

You lie in hospice care

I was afraid and alone

But part of you was still there

I’m left with an urge 

To visit your grave

It’s a day’s drive away

I’ll get back there some day 

There’s a piece

There’s a piece of me

In that sky

Wide open, pale blue

Formations of water molecules 

Hanging over you

There’s a piece of my spirit

Suspended there

Trapped between

Everything and nowhere 

        

There’s a piece of you in me

The thing that made me be

Degrading increasingly 

By degrees

There's some peace in me

Waiting for you

To encircle, envelope and encourage 

Like I could never do

Like I always wanted to

There’s some peace somewhere on earth

A small patch of turf

Next to your son

Steps from bamboo clanging 

And swaying in the sun

There’s a piece of me

Back there

A place painful to gaze into

But I am strong enough to care

I will clean your stone

When I visit you there

Static Sound Décor

Today I've released a new album called Static Sound Décor. A collection of songs I like to think of as rhythmic drone. On Static Sound Décor I consciously set out to explore the rhythmic drone ideas that had been at the heart of my 2020 release Experiments in Relaxation. In this instance I tried to keep a rhythmic center while the original motif spun off new permutations that were melodically related. I didn’t shoot for songs structures so much as air architecture; a space carved out that would hover in time that the listener could inhabit for a moment. The goal for these though is not necessarily relaxation or escapist by design so much as my past efforts. The goal here was more therapeutic and pretty much just for my own enjoyment in the act of creation. I've released this digitally on my Bandcamp and all streaming services, but also on CD. The CD version contains a couple of bonus tracks that will not be released digitally. I've also made a video for the first track:

Echoes & Endings

On May 6th, 2022 I'll be releasing a mixtape via my bandcamp site I'm calling Echoes & Endings. It’s a mix of unreleased material ranging from 1997 through 2007 with one song that was finished this year. The material ranges from my typical electro-acoustic instrumentals to earnest indie pop to ambient noise. I see it as an historical document and also as an examination of the duality of Hifi Envelope as a project with one foot in firmly in the esoteric experimentation and another deeply rooted in the pop tradition. 

Visit my bandcamp for more for more information.  

 

Or least of all, you

 

Of course there are no comments

No reactions good or bad

To the musings of the nearly talented

Shrouded in disdain

Longing for cold days

In the back alleys of sunny places

From decades long ago spent

In confusion and ecstatic joy

Only you didn’t know it yet

It wasn’t clear until

The illusion faded

Like now

Unable to parse out

Happiness from sadness

Need from want

But when the echoes

Become distorted remnants 

Of the strong signal

Surging through you now

You’ll recognize 

All of the beauty that was 

There in your grasp

In every breath

And sigh great fat tears

Of remorse 

Like now

Words and picture by BCFL