first upload of the year

hello, friends and family :)

in the coming months my subtitles may change to address a wider audience. this post, though, is directed to the 16 people I actively reached out to, asking if they’d like to be a part of my email list. no one said no! 16/16.

this is the first song I’m releasing this year (the last thing I released was at the end of 2022). my life has changed a lot since then. I’ve never thought of myself as a goal-oriented person, but as I roll into my mid-20s, I’ve found that doing the bare minimum in considering what I want out of life in the next half-decade has its benefits.

in the last couple years+ of pondering how creativity fits into my life, I’ve tried on many hats. I’ve dreamt up ideas for concept albums that sit unfinished in a maze of folders on my laptop. I’ve made loads of one-off tracks and ideas that exist at various stages of incomplete.

I go back and forth all the time on what my finished works should look like. cohesive or disparate? prolific or intentional? it’s tough to know how to proceed sometimes when your inspirations fall all over the map. it’s clear that these questions don’t have right, wrong, better or worse answers. but I have believed for a long time, in some way or another, that my MO should be to find [the] approach that is right for me.

I’m hoping to get away from this mentality. let me list a couple reasons why:

1. it makes it so planning my vision takes all my energy, leaving me without any juice to create the work itself

2. I am not a one note person; a singular approach doesn’t reflect my variety of feelings and interests and the way they change over time

I think that a big part of what I’ve been grappling with is the idea of marketability. that I have to streamline my ideas into one succinct aesthetic. that it needs to be quick to digest, and that each piece must obviously represent the whole, like a jigsaw puzzle depicting a familiar image. not so.

let’s talk about goals.

some of my goals in creating are:

• consistent output

  • I am tired of sitting on files for years and would like to begin moving out some inventory

• enjoying what I create and the process of creating it

  • fun is always important

• having at least one fan

  • there is something really special about finding a random piece of music on the internet with little to no following, becoming obsessed with it and revisiting it throughout the years, knowing that the listen count is probably one third you. I’d love to be on the other side of that equation sometime

• connecting with people

  • it could be exciting to share this music with folks in a real, physical space. this is less a focus right now, more a future possibility

my goals do not include:

• making this into the primary focus of my life

  • there’s lots of ways that I love to spend my time and energy

• turning this into a career/profiting

  • I worry that if I did I would hate it. if it ever happened it would have to be very much on my own terms

and nowhere in my list does it say that my work needs to be digestible, genre-identifiable, marketable, fit within a label, etc. I don’t think any of my biggest inspirations are this way. what makes them so special to me is how THEM they are.

so here I am, posting a new song, and hoping that as I continue to release music, it paints a bigger picture - not of something streamlined, but rather of ME. a broad image that expands in all different directions.

with this, I give you Ethereal Beat - I recorded this in February 2024 in what appears (from file info archaeology) to be a single sitting. I put the sections together into an arrangement in August 2024 in a single sitting. I took my best crack at a mix and master over the course of a couple weeks in January 2025. Greta made the artwork for it and I love how it turned out.

there’s not a ton going on all at once in this song, and I like that about it.

thank you for reading <3

links:

soundcloud, spotify, youtube, apple music, bandcamp