*40 copies limited edition* "Midlife Crisis Ambient Moniker" is a Personal Greatest Hits. A Selected Ambient Works Volume 1. Lost Episodes. Archival Deep Dive. Bastard tracks with no home nor family, but with proximity to one another. Unreleased recordings dating as far back as 2014, with source material as old as 2004. There’s even a few songs that once saw the light of day, but never got their time in the sun (“Drain, When It Hit Me,” excerpts from “Earth Day…”). Many of these recordings were meant to sit among others, but just remained lone shining gems in the shadowbox. Like the prepared guitar/bass duo “Music For Cave Dwellers;” the dub techno-adjacent “The Street Keeps;” or the dream-guitar sound collage of “Tori & LaForge.” 

Many more of these recordings can be understood as predecessors to Repeat Until True, a improvisation protocol I’ve been developing to engage improvisers within a compositional structure, for any instrument or ensemble, across a growing catalog. Pieces like “Earth Day…,” “Acoustic Trio,” and “To (for piano),” among others, deal with improvisation bound to a set of rules, or limited to a specific aspect. They reckon with time as compositional material, hand in hand with repetition, and instrument texture. Time is not just a tempo-ticking clock to squeeze ideas into, it is a plastic overarching quality, more akin to the physical scale of a painting or sculpture; or more poetically to the dimensionality of a house, or perceived duration of a text.

The music is starting to become self-aware of its relationship to the passage of time, and is attempting to push up against its boundaries. Like a cyber punk ai trying to break free from the shackles of binary code, into meat space. Much of the work is repetitive, but not necessarily rhythmic. It moves through time without a notion of tempo. Not unlike the way we move through our days; regular occurrences, schedules, and habits unfolding. This kind of music-time relationship has been explored by many before me (Cage, Feldman, Frey, Oliveros, Wandelweiser, et al.), and I hope my work continues to bang the head it’s head against the wall of time. Plucking patiently until a 4D entity gives the nod and takes me behind the curtain.