I’m heavily jazz influenced, love classical impressionism, but am also math and composition obsessed and have spent decades down the rabbithole of harmony and sound trying to manifest and cherry pick sounds that I loved and collect them into music that is probably unlistenable for most people.
I have an unhealthily large collection of weird effects pedals I’m constantly tweaking, and a love for vintage tones and warmth coupled with sonic novelty. I like sweetness, quirkiness, dissonance, catchiness, and humor in music and am obsessed with nailing a sweet spot there that probably doesn’t exist.
I challenged myself to start an album with visual imagery as the inspiration. I generated images of vibey pool rooms and then improvised to try to conjure the vibes I was feeling. Bottled the juju and here we are with 2 mixtape-inspired tracks meant to just steamily steep yourself inside in the background of your wet, hazy, bath-tiled, dreamy day.
Me trying my best to make something that sounded more like “songs” and not a meandering landscape of intensely evolving improvisation. Catchy and somewhat dancey bits about, probably my most “colorful” and memorable tunes are in here. Quirky and beat-centric, built around the most weird-yet-usable guitar sounds I could conjure at the time. All guitar, bass, drums, (maybe some light vocals) and way too many effects pedals.
This was all about capturing guitar sounds. At the time I was really into the Chase Bliss Habit and Blooper and these dominate the album. I’m always trying to use these bleep-bloop machines in a song-ish context, so this is my early effort to take all my bedroom sound experimentations and get them into a more listenable format. Some of these definitely take you on a trip, hence the name.
This album was the first one after a long spell of not finishing anything. I decided to ditch my previous vocal centered concept and just play the guitar. Long, winding epic jams meant to be listenable and repeatable. I put together the most insane chain of stereo effects I possibly could and limited myself to exactly 1 track each of guitar, bass, and drums to see how big of a sound I could make with just a trio concept.
Most of it was recorded during a months-long struggle with insomnia; I’d often wake up at 3AM unable to get back to sleep so… I’d zombie into my recording room and get lost in pedals and improv for hours. I still really like this album—I think it captured that period of my playing well.