Wilderness And Luxury (CS/digital, Dasa Tapes, 2022)

Wilderness And Luxury is my first album of creative music since 2018’s Beginners, and like last year’s Fraufraulein tape Solum, feels to me like creative practice and language catching up with my life in California. In other ways, I hear materials that I’ve been working with for years finding new expressions and clarity.

As ever, a poetry of personal language and public topographies, a potential for our inner language and responses to find a relationship together. A reckoning of the distance between people, shaped by our engagement with the world around us. Over the past 4 years of my life, I began to understand this topography as wilderness and luxury.

Similar to how Solum brought into relief the required changes of our relocation on how Andy & I create collaborative music, the materials and processes we have stuck with, and those that have lost connection, or are in ways unavailable to us right how, Wilderness And Luxury is my language changed. I think all of the electronic material was recorded on the floor of our bedroom in February and March of 2020, with headphones, over the low vibration noise of the large kitchen exhaust fan, above our ceiling, from the restaurant below our apartment.

The sunrise will flood our windows, we can see the trees from the same view, and on clear nights the colors of sunset reflect onto the city to our east. The sound of recycling and compost trucks wakes me most mornings, but the bus stops at the far end of the block are not as insistent. Climbing the small hill that crests our street, the mountains are visible across the bay. I spent a lot of time over the past two years out in this topography with our child, just going where we go and seeing what we see. The trees and the water is so close, a city has laid itself through and upon this, then wrapped itself with the same trees and water.

The selection, editing, mixing and sequencing of what has become Wilderness And Luxury took place mostly through the spring and early summer of 2020, with small adjustments as I lived with this work. Some of the field recordings are from our time in California, some are archival.

If you are not into bandcamp, or paypal, or venmo, or money, please hit me up and I will get you music.