how this came to be:

to be honest, this project came about randomly. i spent the summer working on a full-length album, one that we'll call MSP for now. from the beginning, i wanted MSP to be complete with drums and guitars and vocals and charm... except i didn't have the space to properly record vocals and certain instrumentation that i knew the album needed, so it was temporarily placed on the back burner right as the summer was wrapping up. i felt compelled to finish it before the summer ended, but put simply: i didn't want it to sound bad. as of now it is about 80% complete, and i am going to get right back to working on it now that this one is done :)

sooooo... when i got to school i of course started a new project, one that i decided was going to be a collection of eight to ten shorter ambient cuts that each presented their own specific sonic landscape. (i was in pre-production for a film of mine and was considering composing for it myself, so i wanted an excuse to practice scoring) for example, i had one that sounded like the hull of a sinking pirate ship, one that was very dreamy and airy, one that was straight up scary drone vibes, etc. (these few eventually became Look Around..., Fond, and Mutterhaus) as i found myself laying down the ambient instrumentation, i slowly started to realize that the tracks had a lot more potential to them than just ambience, and that the sonic foregrounds were perhaps meant to be sonic backgrounds. i began adding more instruments on top of these layers, from pianos to steel drums to guitars to things i myself can't even describe, and i also started experimenting pretty heavily with electronic drums, all of which brought the original ambient tracks to life more than i had ever anticipated. some songs were kept as ambient drones, receiving heavier textures and small melodic sequences, and others became anthemic.

how this ACTUALLY came to be:

the inspirations for these songs, given their scattered nature, have come from all over. up-front: my roommates and i started a Minecraft world recently, which lead me to another nostalgic dive into C418's incredible soundtracks. this inspired lots of the delicate video-gamey piano parts, especially those on Autumn Snow and Movement. i also drew a lot of inspiration from the producer George Daniel. his work for The 1975, as well as Dirty Hit label-mates The Japanese House and No Rome, directly inspired the mostly electronic percussion and anthemic sounds on the tracks Movement, Hear Me, and Fond. i saw Gaspar Noé's film Climax while i was abroad in Spain, and it stayed with me the entire year. i rewatched it with my best friends on Halloween began working on Selva! almost immediately after. i watched the remake of Suspiria as well, which, in combination with Thom Yorke's soundtrack, inspired Mutterhaus. i started working on Chambers after listening to Bon Iver's new album i,i. it was originally just the middle section, a pretty complex fifty second blend of quickly warping synths. it stayed like that until the end of this project, when i became inspired to give it more life after seeing how far the other tracks had come. since the project doesn't really have sonic cohesion, i'm hesitant to call it an album. it's more of just a dip into what has been inspiring me lately :)

as always, whether you're listening to the tracks or just reading this description, it means the absolute world that someone out there is hearing me in some way. even if it's only for fifteen minutes, i am genuinely compelled to do this kind of work every single day. even at midnight when i had to be up at 5am for my film, i would find myself noodling around with these tracks in bed... it's so addicting, it's so gratifying, and it makes me so much happier than anything else. you being a part of it somehow makes it even better <3

much love,

jack

p.s.

as mentioned, stay tuned for more music and a film of my own !