Years End

Closing the year out with this duel release. I'll start with the fun one.

The Great Sun, The Rose Sun, The Dying Sun:

Formulaic switch up here with these two records. Generally my long form tracks are drone and neoclassical minimalism, where I really explore the experimental music side of things. This one works more as a prog rock odyssey style long song.

I had been fixing to write a Dark Crystal   album for years now. In my efforts I never found myself picturing that world so I always wound up pivoting to make the album about whatever it was my brain did end up seeing.

In any case this one was made with the creation of Thra in mind from the creation stories. I have all the fancy extra lore books and comics that have been out and about so it's pulled from the extra materials.

I had three separate song ideas, one for each of the suns. As writing them went on my head started connecting the tracks so I ended up combining it all into this single thing. This was a big mix of active songwriting and improv. I was going to try not to get back into my doom ways but couldn't help myself. I sort of just let the music go where it wants to and not control too much what my intentions are with an album. This is why my music is seemingly so genre scattered. It just makes sense in my head. That's all there is to it.

Endless:

This one's going to get into mental health stuff and reference some trauma dealings. It won't go into specifics but just letting you know...

As far as the music goes, this one is a droney minimalist classical album, however, this one is split into distinct tracks. The formulaic switch up now has a counterpart.

The last week of November I found myself having, what seemed like, a brutal panic attack. It went for the course of about four hours and it probably took me three days to really recover from and regain a sense of self again. This album was written through that experience.

I have been in therapy weekly for the last four years or so. Two and half years of that was spent going through EMDR ( Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing )

To absolutely understate it, it's been a wild ride. It REALLY has not been easy however at the other side of what I've gone through, I feel incredible. To really keep it broad strokes here, I spent the majority of my life in a near constant state of flight, panic, and self preservation as a result of my experiences.

Through the journey of re visiting and reprocessing all these memories and experiences, I have learned to come to terms with and separate the events outside of "who I am" and allow them to exists as "something happened to me". If you go back through the music I have put out over the past few years you will find references to these themes all over.

So what was the thing I called a panic attack? It was a PTSD reaction that sent me right back into what my "normal state" was for so long and it fucking sucked. As means to my own re grounding, I sat down and made music about it. And so that's what Endless is. I didn't plan this one and I wasn't sure about what to do with its existence but I figured 'Just put it out alongside the next one, allow some vulnerability to be front and center, and let it go'

It's been four months since the EMDR sessions have ramped down and I am still learning to adjust how I interact with the world alongside this newly grounded idea of self. This won't be the last time I have this slip up. I can say, as terrible as it was to feel again, it made me appreciate deeply where I am now and the person I feel like I can become. I have so much learning still to do.

I like to sign off on things with the line 'keep going'. A reference to The Black Corridor. In the story the main character finds himself deep in a drug bender, no sense of reality, and spiraling towards some sort of salvation that may or may not exist. Under the impression he is ultimately doing right, he is pushed forward by the idea that salvation awaits on a distant planet he may or not be on the right path towards.

I don't know if I am actually heading towards Barnard's Star at this point. Maybe at least I finally broke the proditol cycle. I don't know anything for sure but I have to keep doing what's best for me.

Keep going.