Good morning ~

Breaking form a bit today - no writing to share, but I do have 30 blessedly untroubled minutes of new music to offer, constructed entirely from samples from this song. Free streaming and pay-what-you-want downloads on Bandcamp.

Listen:

Good morning ~

Every few Thursdays this email will be for paying subscribers only. Today is one of those! I wrote about an exhaustive and surreal weekend, art handling, loaves of bread, and playing the banjo. Today’s track is made from samples of an old and weary piano I found this weekend - it’s dedicated to the memory of the composer Harold Budd.

…so I grabbed both of their bulks and returned home to my experimental art co-op apartment two hundred dollars richer, the fitted sheet on my mattress on the floor felt finer than silk as I slid downhill in my sleep, the pit bulls in the kennel in the front of the bar across the street barking their exultations.

In January of this year I saw music my friend composed performed in the actual crypt of an enormous church. I walked there from work and listened to an audiobook about George Jones. The crypt was quiet and the instruments bounced off the walls, like ghosts with debts to settle. I felt far, far away from everything, further than I had felt in years. In January of this year I took my dad to see some experimental music at a place with incredibly ornate wooden speaker cabinets and kombucha on tap. We sat on the floor and listened to processed oboe, then we sat on the floor and listened to processed pedal steel. During the second set I realized I had somehow lost my earring, a beautiful gold hoop with turquoise beads hand-made by a friend. After the show my dad and I got on a scooter I rented with an app and rode over to an old bar. We drank a couple of beers while my dad got hit on relentlessly, but they didn't serve any food, so we walked to another bar and got a late dinner, over which we argued about politics but I think I won.

In February of this year we went to a crowded restaurant in the East Village that served Filipino food. The complicated cocktail I ordered came with a little toy pig on a surfboard resting on the edge of the glass and that little toy pig on a surfboard is now on a bookshelf in an apartment in a different city entirely. My girlfriend gave me a new earring to replace the one I had lost, she got in touch secretly with the friend who made the last one and got another. I was very surprised and we smiled wide at each other over across the tiny table. That night we wanted to lose our minds and listen to our favorite DJs but we unexpectedly ran into some friends and acquaintances on the way into the bar who absolutely killed the mood for dancing, through no fault of their own. So we stood on the dance floor for 1 minute completely surrounded by strangers and simultaneously decided to leave. The guy driving the cab on the way home told me about taking acid and seeing behind the veil of reality, then he told us we should check out Dario Argento's movies (which we did the next day). In February of this year I got like a dozen people together to cram onto a tiny jewel box stage to play my songs. There were so many people in the room that people were actually turned away, which as far as I know is the first and only time that has ever happened when I've performed. Truthfully, I don't remember too much about that night, and trying to think about it is a bit like standing under a too-hot shower or staring into the sun. I definitely hugged more people that night than I have in all the days and nights combined since, though - other details are lost.

The year is 1999. You are eleven years old and you contain one multitude. Following in the example of your much older brother you asked your mom if it would be okay if you could maybe dye your hair. She says yes, immediately, as long as it goes back to normal before the school year starts (and the entire time you're a teenager it never occurs to you how fortunate you are to live in a home where this kind of experimentation and self-expression is accepted). It is the beginning of summer and she drives you to the nearest place that sells any variety of manic panic. You quickly chose the color blue. Back at home your mom enthusiastically helps you first bleach your hair light enough to take in the dye. It's a complicated process that involves a barber shop bib and tin foil and sitting on the lid of the toilet but the chemical miasma in the upstairs bathroom fills your lungs and you feel maybe, possibly, cool. The blue dye sets beautifully and you line your scalp with LA looks and watch the now richly yves klein blue, sharply pointed curls set, like waves freezing on a lake. You look in the mirror and imagine yourself playing guitar loudly on an outdoor stage, there is a crowd, there is a beach and they are screaming for you, for you, for you. You have only learned your first few chords, worked out some tablature for a Red Hot Chili Peppers song, but with this look - rebellious and yes, alternative - the roar of the spring break crowd in the afternoon sun feels inevitable, as inevitable as the roar of the waves, breaking at the edge of the earth.

You want very deeply to be different. Both separate from the pack and different from how you are right now (chubby, cherubic, quick to tears, nerdy). You want to be distinct from your peers, noticeable, desirable. These concepts are vague, you lack the words for them, exactly, but you ache for it anyway. At the same time you want to change because you have started to see that the things you naturally gravitate toward are simply not cool. You learn very quickly through the vicious feedback of your junior high peers what is cool and what is not. Partially because of the bullying, partially because of suddenly needing girls to pay attention to you, partially because of the pop punk your cousin is getting you into, partially because your mom loved hard rock when she was a stoned LA teenager and now plays zeppelin IV loud in the car on the way to school, partially because of the influence of your older brother who dyed his hair long before you and used to play in bands in the garage and you could hear the drums from down at the other end of the cul de sac (he once took you to see weezer and the get up kids and reggie and the full effect in San Diego, your cousin had to hide his wallet chain in a bush outside the venue before security would let you in) what you allow yourself to enjoy is changing. Playing the cello is not cool anymore, listening to yo yo ma CDs is even more not cool, crying at your cello lesson regularly is absolutely not cool (although, not your fault: the teacher speaks in a confusingly frank tone and aims every lesson toward eventually getting you a gig. When you tell him you want to play stuff like Smashing Pumpkins he really loses it and says you're wasting everyone's time but you're not sure why). The disco songs you love to shout at the top of your lungs on the way to school are not cool, even though they make you bouncy and happy (you will never admit to a love for Anita Ward in your AOL Instant Messenger profile). Church is okay, not cool exactly, but it is complicated - at school you can never admit you go to church, even though you spend the entire summer there and your mom works there, because no one at your tiny little middle school goes to the same church as you or even the same type of church as you, exactly. At your church the youth pastor shows you how to play counting crows songs (which, not cool, but learning guitar is cool) and he does motocross on the weekends. In the lounge area where youth services are held (which is really far from the choir loft full of old people where you spent a lot of time in elementary school) they have a couple video game cabinets and a wonky pool table and an N64 and before and after services you and your friends play wrestling videogames. All of that is cool, and in this rarefied space loving god is cool, too, so you're much more popular and comfortable at church than you ever will be at school. At church you can sing your little aching heart out during the tear-jerker worship ballads and your wet-eyed conviction demonstrates inner strength, whereas almost everywhere else being too excited about anything shows you to be weak and invested, rather than aloof and dismissive (it's cool to be dismissive). And the one group leader who came back from two years of clandestine ministry work in China takes you to watch wrestling pay-per-view events and eat hot wings at a sports bar once a month. One time he took you and a bunch of friends laser tagging, too, not even a church thing, this was just for fun and he actually broke his foot while he was playing when he took a corner too hard. But he didn't cry out and he didn't stop the game, in fact he kept shooting and ended up winning the match because he was so low to the ground. Afterwards he hopped to his car. You didn't see him as weak or too old to be playing laser tag, you saw him as badass. He's cool, because everyone says that the work of bringing christ abroad was dangerous, he could have died or been put in prison, but he testified anyway and had some success, and one early morning in Santa Barbara after sleeping over in a different church on a summer camp trip he tells you about being a warrior for christ, how his love made you strong, his love was a shield, and how in heaven it's not that you walk the streets of gold but rather that you simply exist in his presence, immortal and unyielding. So you consider yourself a warrior for christ, you imagine defeating satan in a cage match and when you mouth along the words in rage against the machine songs playing on your discman you feel the hooves of the four horsemen rumbling in the distance. Your faith is a secret strength: though it is never to be mentioned to your dad or your brother or especially your grandfather or any of your classmates it simmers inside you, an ever-lit torch. Though at the same time you are also obedient and terrified. You are confused and disgusted by wobbly new body feelings and sometimes wake up from nightmares of underground caverns and sulfurous fire. This tension within you is pulled taut, like a seatbelt on too tight - you feel your faith restraining your movements, at times keeping you apart from your peers or members of your family. But it defines you, too, it sets you apart, and in this you take delight, so that when your hair gel sets into tight, hard, blue curls and you leave the house in a button-down shirt with dragons and flames running down the side you feel celestial, brilliant - an unwavering band of light.

Cold walk home today, I looked up overhead. Sunset starts too early these days, both of the middle-aged strangers I spoke to this afternoon said so and I agreed (one at the springs, one at the library). Pinks starting to ring the clouds, and parallel to me, a tiny jet engine plane, its long tail streaming out behind it, white and just starting to get the dusk colors going. From my perspective it looked like a needle being dragged slowly across the light blue skin of the sky, leaving a just-on-the-verge-of-bleeding scratch. From where I was looking we seemed to be going along in the same direction, at the same speed. I stopped and wondered if the plane would stop in mid-air, too. Who was flying in that tiny plane at 4:15pm today above the airspace of my little city?

The needle that drags across the platter of plastic accepts the vibrations of the audio information embedded in the plastic. The embedded music shakes the needle just so, and a series of devices take the information from that shaking needle and broadcast it into a room. In my case my turntable sends signal to a receiver that then sends audio to two big speakers up on milk crates, speakers I bought from a guy's garage on a street with no streetlights or cell service after I saw them listed on Craigslist. He'd only accept cash so I had to drive back into town and get 200 bucks out of the ATM at the Stewart's and when I got back to the garage he popped in a U2 cassette to show that it still worked ("I still haven't found what I'm looking for," the anthem of craigslist). The needle that drags across the plastic only lasts so long, they wear out, and the records that vibrate the needle get scraped again and again, each time the record is played. The needle, however microscopically, rips up the plastic bit by bit. And the plastic blunts back. So every time you listen to an LP you destroy it a little more, until one day you hear the backside of the flip side of the record, the ghostly impression of it, the topographic mirror image of the music on the other side of the record now detected by the needle, which is also ever degrading. In high school I eventually wore out my mom's already worn out copy of everybody knows this is nowhere. I'm on my third copy of it now, and there's nothing more spectral than hearing the backside of music, like seeing the inside of your face.

The last time I slept in a building that no one else was sleeping in was this summer while I was in Georgia for that residency, unless you count camping, in which case the last time I slept alone in a tent was at my friend's pre-wedding sorta-bachelor party thing last summer, that weekend that a few of us got tick bites. I don't sleep alone often these days, not even in a separate room or a separate bed and for this I am very thankful. Those two weeks of total isolation felt so strange to me, like walking the surface of another planet entirely. Almost every other night of my life (while not camping) has been slept in an apartment shared with other people so that even if the roommates were gone or out of town there was probably someone in one of the other apartments on one of the other floors. Although it's possible that apartments I've lived in were empty besides for me, it's hard to tell - I'm not in the habit of taking attendance before going to sleep each night. Once on Christmas I stayed home in NYC, no plans to celebrate, and at the time I was living in this pretty wild loft apartment building and it certainly felt like I was the only one sleeping there. On Christmas morning it felt a little bit like everyone had vacated the city entirely when I first woke up but later I walked 60+ blocks up Broadway and could feel the warmth coming from both the apartments filled with crammed in families and the Chinese restaurants, they were throbbing like hot coals. And I came home late that night from working a shift at the movie theater I worked at and drank alone in the light of our apartment's little christmas tree and not a creature was stirring. Are your dreams more or less powerful if there are people sleeping near you? A sleeping person seems to exert force on a space, wouldn't that force be exerted on someone else sleeping and dreaming? If you were to gather 100 people together for one night and have them sleep as close as possible while still comfortable would their dreams be more extraordinary? Would they have greater fortune telling powers? Would the unusual situation of having 100 people sleeping side-by-side in comfort prevent people from sleeping deeply? Or would their dreams talk to one another, would their dreams rhyme? Would one person dream of 100 floating hot air balloons filling an airplane hangar while another dreamed of 100 balloon animals coming to life while another dreamed of a zoo for watching people who are sleeping? Do we savor a dream of isolation? Or is that a terrible thing to experience, solitude in dreams? Do people who are locked up by military-adjacent government agencies and institutions ever get peaceful sleep? Is it comforting or unbearable to sense someone else sleeping in a cell? Does our breathing link up in some way? If 100 people were breathing air in and out simultaneously would it be possible to accidentally suck all the air out of a room? Would sleeping in a room with 100 plants be, well, a nice thing to do? That answer seems obvious to me. Etc. I've slept a lot of nights in someone's house, sometimes on a couch or on a spare bed or straight on the floor. When someone is hosting you for the night they are allowing you to enter the magnetic field of their sleep. Do you remember what it used to be like staying at someone else's place? Trying to figure out how to use their shower, that moment when they tell you where the extra towels are? Wondering if you parked your car correctly? One that I do less of these days is "where can we get something to eat around here" at any time past 10pm. It's a fun thing to do because that's one way to get to know a town but also encouraging your host to do things they take for granted about where they live is an excellent way to repay their kindness. If you weren't there crashing they wouldn't think to ever go to that diner, but now they're here enjoying disco fries or whatever with you at 2am. If you were there on a weeknight when you would wake up in the morning you might have no instructions at all besides "help yourself" and so you look around for the coffee, look around for the filters, look around, look around. You would truly behold someone else's kitchen. They might leave a note, though, or a plate of food out for you (help yourself, an amazing thing to encourage someone to do, one of those phrases we say all the time but never think about what it truly means. Help yourself. Another is you are welcome, what a beautiful thing to say to someone. Try to really mean it the next time you say it). They might not have told you the WiFi before they left for work so you take your hard won cup of coffee over to a bookshelf and read the titles, you truly behold the titles. Or better yet they have a stack of magazines and so you read something from a New Yorker from like 9 weeks ago while you have your coffee in their space. It's a precious thing because the people that live there don't get to experience this place in that way hardly ever, if ever. Most people you crash with are not in their homes at 10:15am on a normal Thursday, but you were there, half paying attention to a graphic novel while sipping on a second cup of coffee, watching the dust motes swirl in that particular slant of sunlight in that quiet way that midmornings have (negative space, people having left, rare these days). It is holy, in its way. Now we see 10:15am in our Thursday apartments all the time. It's nothing special, really, although lately the radiators have kicked on which makes the place feel new and exciting. Do you remember what it was like, slipping the spare key under the front door?

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Allow yourself to imagine the following. It is early morning in the low, inland hills, and the landscape is all beige and green. The desert boulders, the uncovered, lightened-by-the-sun dirt beneath you, the gnarled arms of the scrub oak choking and alive out of the ground, big patches of tall, swaying grass made thirsty in the heat. But there are cypress trees, too, rich and dark and green, and the sharp, pointy fingers of yucca plants, and the low laying black sage shrubs that creep into the hiking path with their hint-of-purple flowers. It's a little cold so you draw your hands into your sleeves and bunch your hands up against you. In the air are some familiar smells that seem out of place - dark, sweet earth, yesterday's fire, the fumes from someone else's generator. You smell something like a gas station near the beach and something like the rosemary bush growing wild in your dad's backyard. It's very quiet. You hear your own breathing and some birds in the morning and the barely audible wind-ripple of the flora, who seem to be waking up just like you. You spent the night camping, so you awoke with the sun, much earlier than you would otherwise, with that particular and almost delicious stiffness in your back that comes from sleeping out. You zipped yourself out in the morning while in a low crouch, gently moving the pull in a graceful arc up from the ground as to not wake the others. You pulled on your shoes and went to find somewhere to pee, which took longer than expected because the vegetation is so sparse near you - not much privacy. But you are awake now and standing in your long underwear and your favorite hoodie in your pulled on shoes and no socks trying to figure out where exactly the sun will pop up on the horizon. Everyone else seems to still be asleep, you can almost make out their breathing against the walls of the semicircle of tents. Blue tarps that crinkle underfoot. Shoe prints in the dust/dirt. Yesterday no one put up their rain flies - it's so dry here - and when you were first lying down to sleep last night you thought you might never get to. Tent too small, paired with a fellow summer camper you barely know, and the pulsating brightness of the stars overhead. The light through the mesh at the peak was bright enough to keep you awake, but as you stared out into space and saw - truly for one of the handful of times you'll ever experience it in your life - how the points of light trembled, they tremolo'd. You couldn't stop staring. And in fact you stared long enough to see these unfixed twinkles rotate in the sky overhead. Was nothing out there tied down? Could it really be that nothing out there was immovable? Could you truly not set your watch to it? The thoughts felt heavy on your chest. But the ground beneath you pushed back against you laying on it and somehow eventually you drifted off. You dreamed of a tall bridge over a river, or rather you dreamed of a bridge that rose from the landscape, tearing itself from the highways it was connected to. You saw the bridge - white granite, gleaming in the low afternoon sun - stand up and shake itself off as if an old dog called to dinner. You saw it loping toward the sunset shedding cars with each step. The dream is still with you now, but it's just a glimmer, and all you can recall in this moment is that you dreamed of water flowing. You try to bring it back to life but the permanence around you draws your attention away from the walking bridge. This sky feels eternal, the sandstone you're standing on feels unending, your life and maybe this camping trip feel like they will continue on forever, constantly unfolding before you. You're tired and far away from where you live but, as the sun just starts to crest, you are more awake than you can recall ever having been. You feel a warm wind and you are aware of it, you feel every single molecule of air rushing past you, though you are yourself infinite you feel the infinitesimal erosion of your features that this wind brings. It is carving you, ever so slightly, and were you stand in this place for 10,000 years you would finally be unrecognizable. You would be blank. You remember all of a sudden that there is a river nearby, the whole reason you and the others have come here. You're not sure what tubing is and you don't plan to find out. But you love swimming, the freedom and the surrender it gives you. Yesterday, on the way over, you complained to the chaperones. You said, but where will we shower, hoping that by pointing it out they'd somehow realize their mistake and turn the whole caravan around. But they laughed good-naturedly at you instead, saying well first of all you don't have to shower when you're camping. When you thought of how long a week was you must have looked horrified. So they said if you really want you can take a bath in the river, and then one of them said yeah I brought a bar of soap, irish spring, get it? And handed you the box. So you come down off your eternal rock and gently rifle through the tent and get the bar out and borrow a towel from your tentmate. You arrived late the night before, sundown already started and a big rush to get the tents up cook dinner etc, no chance yet to go see the river you drove all this way to come camp next to. Not sure where it is, but over the magnetic silence of the others sleeping you hear a faint babbling coming from over toward the sun, which is now more than halfway up over the horizon. So you walk toward it, soap and towel in hand, stepping over the dry little plants in the path. Allow yourself to imagine this. Imagine the smoothness of the bar of soap in your hand, allow yourself to trace the words IRISH SPRING embossed in the mint chocolate chip green. Picture the blue and white stripes of the towel. Hear the sound of your clothes hitting the rock as they drop balled from your hand. Count the goosebumps that rise from your skin, map exactly where your tan line starts, where your board shorts hit your knees. Listen to the river growing louder with each step, tv static growing and hissing and beneath it, the throb of stones smoothing below the surface. Allow yourself this. Be there. Hold your breath as in you step.

When you return from the river you will see someone, another awake. A friend of yours, you'd like to think. She will be writing something in a book. You will ask her what she's doing and she will say, cryptically, that she begins each day with a psalm.

Moments of grace since I last wrote you.

1. After donating a very small amount of money to a local independent radio station/community center I am thanked with a personal email. I reply asking if there's anything I can do to help. In fact there is. Join this meeting in a couple of days and help us make a local news show. So I get on the Zoom call and am welcomed, warmly. This is almost a moment of grace but not quite. A gaggle of volunteers interrupt each other and have bad internet connections but somehow the week of news is scheduled, all these community members interview other community members and they air the results five days a week. That's the whole show, and it's honestly incredible. I am very impressed with the whole operation. The pieces they air are surprisingly hard hitting at times but also endearingly unpolished, sometimes they're about gun violence or environmental toxins but sometimes they're about local theater or nice people doing their normal jobs. This week they have all the interviews scheduled out but they need someone to help host. They say hey Ben do you want to do it. I am terrified because I do not even begin to know what doing it means. But they say oh it's easy and we'll help you, you should do it. And I say okay. And I see my name go into the google sheets spreadsheet, suddenly I am part. I will be hosting the show live via my home studio to probably not that many but still untold numbers of listeners. I have quite literally dreamed of reaching people in these socially barren months and soon my nervous voice will be on the (low power) radio waves. The next day I spend a lot of time putting together the script for the episode and worrying about it but sure enough it's not that big of a deal and in-between segments my cohost and my engineer send cute little messages of encouragement in the zoom chat. Those are nearly moments of grace, and so too is when my buddy from NYC - who I offhandedly mention the radio show to - enthusiastically tunes in and is as excited as you could ever want someone to be. He wants to hear my voice. But I just read the script into my microphone, simple, and it goes okay. One segment I hadn't really paid attention to earlier while writing up the script catches me off guard. It's an interview with a deacon and a reverend at a local church - they're talking about how surreal it is to hold services over the Internet. And when the interviewer asks the reverend at the end if there's anything else she wants to say she asks if its okay if she blesses the listeners. The interviewer says um yes sure go ahead and you can actually hear her bow her head - her voice hits the microphone differently. She sighs. And she prays. She asks the lord to bless the listeners of this public radio station, listeners who are seeking fuller truths. She wishes them strength and happiness. And she prays that the listeners find that their lives are rich in community and generosity.

This is a weekly newsletter where I send out a new “nice sounding” track, some writing, and a picture of something I saw. It’s also one way I let people know what I’m up to otherwise. Thank you for reading. You can hear every single My Big Break track . You can also now .

black lives matter

Good morning ~

Just a quick note that today’s live stream show has had a last-minute time change!

I was not aware (and my co-organizers didn’t realize) that Italy began Daylight Savings Time last night, so to keep the 9pm time slot in Italy, the stream today is now at 3pm NYC time.

Good morning -

How is it possible that I have not written to you since came out? It feels like many, many weeks have gone by, but it has in fact been only six days since last I emailed this list - the math doesn’t add up. And I’m a bit late in getting you this this morning, apologies ~

Hello -

I'm writing this to you at NIGHT in the DARK in my LIVING ROOM, instead of in the morning at my breakfast table. Its because I just saw one of the best shows I have ever seen in my many years of seeing shows like at least once a week, doesn't even matter who (it was Daniel Romano, appearing as Daniel Romano's Outfit). It was LOUD rock and roll stuff, like footage of the early Who or what I always imagine the band Quasi might sound like live circa 2010, but then they also had these utterly devastating country harmonies and they NEVER STOPPED they just kept playing, played the songs right back to back (very like the Who, but somehow way cooler, also?). Ended with a Ramones cover. I wrote one of those rental electric scooters as it started raining harder and harder and the rain was freezing, slapping against my face, stinging it, as I bore down faster and faster downhill, pushing the little wimpy engine as fast as it would go. I got home in eight minutes, I'm shivering, I feel like ripping apart all the furniture in my house with one arm tied behind my back. I'm very, very amped. I took a melatonin chewable and I poured a big sleepy time tea and hopefully this takes the spirit of the rhythm right outta me.

Good morning ~

Lately I have found myself so deeply enriched by the community of people I play music with and for, the shows at my house, the shows I play, the shows my friends play, and all the talking and hanging out and being in a room that all that entails. It’s been a big part of my life for a long time, but more and more I find real joy and ease and security within it. This weekly thing is a part of it, which means you are, too, and I feel a very strong desire to acknowledge this right now and also thank you. Thank you.

Good morning ~ ~ ~

I wanted to make something this week that sounded like it was just barely being held together, like a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter in the rain. I twisted the delay knob on my new little keyboard and let the notes warp. Almost a week later I wrote about hearing the sounds of people’s voices in the distance, bent by the speed of the roller coaster they were riding. I didn’t realize these things were similar until just now, when I brought them together for you. The image is from a long day of assembling LP inserts - - they’re almost ready for you.

Good morning ~

I’ve got a new single out today. It’s called “Am I Doing Right by You?” and you can hear it in all the various places:

good morning -

I dreamed last night that I was playing guitar in a dark, cabaret-type bar. There were two women singing, beautiful harmonies, and I was backing them up. Unexpectedly, they launched into a cover of a song I knew how to play but didn’t quite recognize at first. I strummed the chords, straining to remember. But when the big chorus came, I knew it was “. And I started crying, crying and strumming, crying harder than I can ever recall crying. At the end of the song the two women I was backing up turned around to ask me if I was okay and they were crying, too. Then I woke up.

Hello what's up with all of you ~

The music this week is the result of my shiny new synth-o-sizer which I have been enjoying immensely. Then I put this artificial tape cassette wobble on nearly everything and now it sounds poignant. Funny how that works, with a few certain chords and a few certain signifiers you can make something that sounds like the fourth act of a movie. I named it Key Food 2 because that's what my memo recorder has started calling all my voice memos, and it's nice - it's like, the music is key, the sounds are clutch, it is nutritional, twice.

Good morning ~ ~ ~

The music this week features very subtle background noise of the post-show kinda-party hang after the last Tortoise Town. Most parties sound the same, if you zoom out far enough, if you listen to every conversation at once. I had trouble with the music, it wasn’t doing what I wanted it to do, and I couldn’t articulate what that want was. Offhandedly I said to my roommate maybe I need to turn the delay up. He said try it, dude, and I did. And then it was done, simple as that.

Good morning ~

The music this week is particularly sleepy - - at the end of a long day I fired up the synthesizer and sort of don’t remember how this piece came about. Uncharacteristically I slept through my alarm the following morning, waking up 45 minutes later than usual, and as I sprinted out the front door unshowered I wondered how that thing I was working on turned out…

Good morning ~ ~

Once again I am waiting until the absolute last minute to write this and, as I type this sentence, I have no idea what I’ll end up writing about.

Happy New Year ~ ~

Most often when I write these emails there is nothing else I’d rather be doing. I enjoy the process of putting these together, in fact I look forward to sending them, and when I write I feel a deep peace that is hard to come by otherwise. But the fact is that right now I am fulfilling an obligation (imposed only by me on myself). I gotta do this thing. This is what I do! But even though I’m not feeling it at the moment I am very grateful to have you here, and hope you enjoy the ritual.

Hello - - -

Writing to you this week partially from my work computer and partially from the air. I’m sending it extra early because I am now on the west coast. As I write this sentence I’m on a de-iced and running late flight to LAX where I will get picked up by a buddy. In a few days my sister and I will drive to Las Vegas - I look forward to seeing some absolutely brutal roadside sand expanse and I look forward to drinking 7-11 coffee and hot chocolates with my family while we look at various Christmas lights strewn over various desert flora. How many years in a row does it take for something to become tradition? This will be my third year playing Pai Gow on Christmas Day, the money I lose is starting to feel like home.

The music this week is a bit of open-hearted piano, tracked plainly in my living room. I tried to leave enough space in-between the chords to let the sound of the dishwasher in the distance burble in as I recorded the sound of the room. Amazingly, the electric organ that lives in my house worked for the ten minutes necessary to fade in here with a beautifully undulating drone - usually it sputters or starts up a drum loop when it isn’t wanted but gladly it just kind of floats, iridescent like an oil slick, up to the surface.

“Don’t be fooled by the Internet. It’s cool to get on the Computer, but don’t let the Computer get on you. You’ve all seen the Matrix. There’s a war going on. The battlefield’s in the mind, the prize is the soul” -Prince Rogers Nelson

Good morning ~

Somehow back in my old habit of writing this at the absolute last minute. But how are you?

Good morning -

Writing to you once again on my phone after a very long night / late night / morning of traveling. But I made it to where I was going and I’m typing from the comfort of a large clean bed. Gimme a break on the typing errors etc

The music this week is a manipulated recording of me playing a piano with the windows open, letting all the sounds of people passing in the street and subways clanging by overhead wash over the spare chords.

Hello -

Writing to you this week from my cell phone while I’m playing shows in the northeast. Part of this was written in a minivan, part of this was written during a show, most of it was written sitting on our friend’s couch in Boston. Now I’m sending it to you (late) from a recording studio in Pawtucket. Please excuse any typos or unexpectedly brief writing, thank you.

The track this week is actually an excerpt from a larger project I was working on last month that has been unexpectedly shelved. I hope you’ll hear the full thing and it’s intended use at some point, and if it does come out I will let you know. But anyway - there are crickets from a summer night in Ohio and slide guitar and a synth with keys held down by tarot cards. The photo is from that rave in the woods I went to a while back (by the way, please keep sending me field recordings !).

There is a delicious little caesura every morning before the hard, rocky facts of life come in, before you consider things like the date, or whatever emails you have to send, or wherever you have to be in a couple of hours. A few moments of clean, blank, white room bliss when you've just woken up. No fear, no anxiety, no anticipation. Remember that this moment is possible and that it will be available to you the next time you wake up. Maybe you could stay in that clean, blank room a bit longer - it's a little flickering flame of calm that you can pass your hand over without getting burned.

Hi - -

Back to writing and music every Thursday!