Sometimes when I’m looking for a photo, another strikes me. I haven’t seen anything with this depth recently. Much less expressed depth.
Tag: process
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photo diary: ferns and depth
Scarborough, ME, July 2025 -
Essai: “Why don’t I know what to look through”
From Instagram:
I’ve been making a few of these free improvisations a week, and I’ve noticed that in hearing the words I sing, I often make a political reading. It’s funny how we can connect any image to our underlying concerns.
I recycle the phrases that stick (“Why don’t I know what to look through?”) and react to new things in the magnified space of recording. When I play them back, what felt like 5 seconds of thinking is usually about .5—so I was actually able to resolve things better than I’d believed.
I’m definitely oriented toward the dark “cloud” around us, but thankfully my spirit also wants to talk to clarity.
Listen to the fifth essai, or attempt/draft/iteration, I’ve put up on SoundCloud here.
It’s starting to get more interesting to hear these compiled together, and there are shifts in my attention when I evaluate songs as communication—something I assume is implied by creating artwork, captioning, and making the experiment visible to others.
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Playlist: Essais from 2025
Gaining some traction in the routine — № 4. Enough for a playlist, which changes the perception of each. What would a whole look like?
Why don’t I know
what to look through?I see you
but I can’t guess -
Essai: “Big cloud raising its head”
With this one, I was mostly focused on getting a workable sound for the recordings going forward. I wanted to sing twice to give the impression of intentionality. As I went back over, following the original words of the improvisation, I started to think of the slight mismatches with an image in mind. I thought about hand tracing over something, how doing that implies that the original is the model.
If something is a model, maybe it takes on that abstract sense of permanence we attribute to song. In fact, I often take issue with this feeling of permanence (existentialists would call it essence) because I think it is false. What I like about the air of tracing is giving both the sense of improvisation—of creation—and of completion and intentionality at the same time. I would like if it helped me, and listeners, to notice both of those aspects of any phenomenon.
Listen to this latest “Essai” on SoundCloud.
Did you see that big cloud
raising its head?
Giving a warning
to everyone
trying hard -
Essai: “Like fresh water at the zoo”
Recently I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out my internet flow. Considering the evolution and present dominance of streaming, I think the internet ought to be the best place to interact with my music. If streaming is the routine (it’s mine too, mostly—Qobuz and my little internet radio), then things like records and printed materials should be secondary, even if they’re perceptually ideal.
I think I have a schematic that works now: polished releases on major streaming plaforms and Bandcamp, drafts/iterations on SoundCloud, full-length visual stuff on YouTube. The hard part is not spending too much time trying to master social media. The plan there is to post snippets that might lead people out to SoundCloud to follow my process.
I’ve always been one to seek and enjoy a good “setup,” and this flow matters to me because now I can think less about where to put things, or why—and I can focus more on deeper, more sensual aspects of attempting artistry.
This one is the twin of the previous Essai: “I gripped it under my sweat” recording. I made both on the same day and had put this one in the “Keep” folder. It’s weird how one day a recording fulfills something and another day it seems strange. Now this one suits me, and I like this line in the present political moment:
Breaking through
old news
is like fresh water
at the zoo.
