I've made a lot of music over the years. here is a sampling of my various projects.
G H O S T P A R K
ghost park is a vessel I use to explore the world around me. people have described it as the soundtrack for a movie that doesn’t yet exist, and I like that. in a vacuum as devoid of musical influence and ego as possible, I will tinker around with various instruments after finishing a book or visiting a new place or while watching a film, letting my mind wander and allowing music to pour forth organically. these songs never attempt to be anything more than what they are, a distillation of my thoughts and memories at that exact moment in time. in this way, they become deeply personal, but at the same time remain prismatic enough for others to draw their own meaning from. my only wish is that you may find enjoyment in these musical moments alongside me.
amaterasu (2023)
like my previous three albums, amaterasu (天照) is inspired by my readings of japanese folklore, history, and poetry. amaterasu is the goddess of the sun in japanese mythology and to reflect this, the album contains some of my brightest and happiest songs. music that expresses my appreciation for the act of creation, my reverence for the natural world and the people in my life, and the wisdom I’ve gleaned from the teachings of zen buddhism. songs of love and merriment, dreams and reflection. amaterasu is part of a larger dual-album concept written to explore the nature of and interrelationships between darkness and light. its heavier and darker counterpart, tsukuyomi, named for the japanese god of the moon — the yin to amaterasu’s yang - will be released later in 2024. the cover art is a watercolor entitled 'dawn' painted by the illustrious hannah moore.
tsukuyomi (2024)
in contrast to the exaltation and fondness for nature and life found on 2023's amaterasu, tsukuyomi (月読) was written to express my contempt and disgust for the modern world - its greed, its filth, its monotony. its betrayal of everything that makes human life beautiful in pursuit of boundless capital and at the expense of those powerless to defend themselves. as such, these songs deal with subjects of nuclear annihilation, transhumanism, singularity, psychedelics, suicide, and other fun topics. to complement this lyrical matter, the album features heavier instrumentals, darker tonalities, more warped and distorted production techniques, and a general malaise that plagued all of its contributors. the cover art is a watercolor entitled 'dusk' painted by the illustrious hannah moore.
sarayashiki (2021)
sarayashiki, which means "the manor of dishes" in japanese, is the first album I made after returning from my travels throughout japan in 2019. as with the previous two albums, it is named after a ghost story from japanese folklore. I personally feel that is it some of the most beautiful music I have written to date and it means a lot to me. the album is entirely instrumental and features more experimental production techniques and sampling than any of my previous works.
mononoke (2018)
mononoke acted as an album of catharsis; a culmination of spending a lot of time in the woods, surrounding myself with nature;
reading a lot of books; delving into japanese folklore and folk music, icelandic neoclassical, ambient minimalism, and film scores;
ruminating on personal failures and flaws, and my apparent lack of ambition; and the deep seasonal abyss I found myself unable to escape.
all of the music on mononoke was written and recorded during the autumn of 2017 and winter of 2018. most of the acoustic instruments
were recorded outside - in the woods,
in the snow, in the rain - to permanently engrain my surroundings into the music. there are no lyrics, as there were no words I could
string together to really convey what I wanted, so the album is left intentionally instrumental. certain aspects of the music were
composed aleatorially, atonally, or improvisationally.
as with my previous release, enenra, this album is titled after a malicious spirit from traditional japanese folklore, the mononoke,
a harbinger of suffering and disease. a fair amount of the music and imagery here is directly inspired by tales of such spirits and
acts as parallels to my own experiences during these tumultuous periods of my life.
H A K A N A I
hakanai is an experimental rock band I formed in boston in 2016 to explore the confines of creative expression through music. the resultant sound is one of restrained chaos, characterized by odd time signatures, key changes, strange harmonies, tempo fluctuations, extreme dynamics, and unconventional song arrangements. we played a few shows and then everyone in the band moved away from me. that is fine. maybe some day we'll finish that second LP. probably not.
decreation (2022)
with our characteristic unparalleled efficiency, we recorded this - our debut album - over a mere six years. it was released on vinyl in 2022. simone weil once wrote, "the self is only a shadow protected by sin and error," and her term for curing this spiritual malady was 'decreation.' this word is a neologism to which she did not give an exact definition nor a consistent spelling. in one notebook, she describes its aim as "an undoing of the creature in us—that creature enclosed in self and defined by self. but to undo self one must move through self to the very inside of its definition." perhaps that is what the album aims to accomplish—to humble, study, and destroy the "self" through creative expression.
S P I T E H O U S E
spite house was a short-lived pandemic project I started over the internet
with my dear friend tyler gilbert. the original intent was simply one of fun, an attempt to rekindle
that early 2000s indie rock sound that was so prevalent back when we were kids and could still experience joy.
fragile bodies (2022)
while trapped in our dismal little apartments, tyler and I wrote something like twenty songs, which I then mixed and mostly mastered. there wasn't really much else to do during those days anyway. the result was fragile bodies, a callback to the post-punk of the 80s and early 2000s. that's about the extent of it.