It is March. The end of winter. A Monday of sorts.
Last Year, 2024
My last update was in announcement of a tour in east Asia, so let’s start from there.
In May and June, I traveled with Kastakila and Emptyflash to play shows in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Bangkok. This was my first real international tour (or tour of any kind), and gave me a taste of some of the machinery involved.
In Beijing, I really enjoyed playing at fRUITYSPACE, a DIY space setup in the basement of a Korean BBQ place.
In Shanghai, we played at Shanghai Concert Hall as part of ICLC 2024. With an audience of over 200 people, it is easily the biggest show I’ve played. At one point a kid in the audience tried to sing along to my sampled bits of a french train announcement jingle.
Over the course of these shows, I’d written a couple of songs on the road and had the opportunity to test them out. Writing songs on the fly without close attention to sound design or mix is new for me, and led to a very different type of music.
The tour turned to be a great exercise in logistics and technique. I wrote about the gear I carried with me and how I used it. It also burned me out. I quickly maxed out on my ability to pour emotion into ideas that were too rough around the edges.
In September, I got started as part of New Inc’s Y11 cohort with Avneesh Sarwate. We have been working on a suite of creative tooling to make interactive audio-visual art that can easily be ported between an installation, web app and a performance. Multimodal art as a means of world-building has been on my mind for a while, so this has been a great impetus to work on it.
The New Inc project has also gotten me into the Faust DSP system a little bit. I still don’t quite understand it, but I’ve been building simple browser-based synthesizers and thinking of ways to build interfaces around them. See here about Andata.
I played 2 shows in New York after the tour.
2024 also marked 10 years of making music as Reckoner. To commemorate this, I made a zine called Galaxy Brain, containing lyrics, art work, album covers, and some old diary entries from the Instructions Unclear era. I worked with Samhita on this. If you know me personally, remind me to send you a copy.
This Year, 2025
I’m excited for this year.
Earlier this season, I recorded more demos and carved structure into fledgling songs. I’m coming around to seeing a body of work potentially result from this; some EPs or an album perhaps.
I’m still shopping around for the right incentives to record and release new music. Instructions Unclear was partially driven by the sheer curiosity to understand the mechanics of making an album. The EPs that followed were quick responses to world events and deliberate acts of off-the-cuff musicking. The new songs I’m working on come from a very different place, and it feels important to present them in a way that highlights that. How these songs are framed, and how they get to people is almost as important to me as the songs themselves.
It’s easy for me to rabbit-hole into the technical and conceptual aspects of this whole project. I enjoy indulging in music technology. I am an engineer, and love spending the time to understand the intricacies of signal chains, fussing over sound design with obscure synths and software, and rigging tools to solve very specific problems. Live coding is a part of this too; hitting that perfect balance of syntactic elegance and improvisational "au milieu" with code is difficult, but satisfying when you do it.
When I write, produce or perform, however, there's also a part of me that is willfully oblivious to the underlying forms and structure, and is fully engrossed in the music for what it is: the sounds, texture, emotional resonance and context. Music is very much a transient artifact meant to be enjoyed for what it is in the moment, and making beautiful, emotionally resonant music is often orthogonal to building something technically or conceptually elegant.
My ongoing struggle to make progress with these songs may have a lot to do with the fact that spending a lot of time any in one of these “modes” of being can cause the other to atrophy. Frequently switching modes is not seamless either, and often comes with costs.
Some of my favorite pieces of music and art do an incredible job at blending conceptual beauty of the form with the more overt aesthetic and emotional beauty. I’m hoping that I too can find a way to get these two parts of me to meet in the middle and reconcile with each other. Then the floodgates will open, and there will be new music to put out.
Shows
I will continue to perform this year. I will play in Barcelona later in the spring at ICLC 2025. More shows may materialize. Announcements to follow.
Office Chart
The Day Of Night by Akira Yamaoka
Hopopono by GoGo Penguin
Uoon I by alva noto, Ryuichi Sakamoto
Le long de la rivière tendre by Sébastien Tellier
Geborrel by Liselotte Oosthuizen