Musings...

I have the impulse to create music that soothes (sound as balm) out of a desire to cope with the reality of life, the injustice at the heart of society. However, I want to go beyond momentary escape: I want to challenge, practice radical healing, activate resilient calm, offer something beautiful and restorative yet decentered. I want people to revel in the unknown, in the unclassifiable. Serene but complex. I believe in music’s ability to replenish the soul because it has deeply replenished mine, and I hope that my music helps people tap into that feeling. 

I am motivated by two seemingly contradictory impulses: to challenge and to soothe. To challenge people to embrace the unknown, the complex, the uncategorizable, the “gray area,” but at the same time to guide them to become more grounded within the organic structures, cyclic processes, and chance operations of the natural world. To challenge people to become aware of glaring injustice, to confront prejudice, yet also endeavor to create space for healing and solace through sound. To confront small-mindedness and tunnel vision, but in so doing to evoke higher planes of being, of possibilities for experience, of assuaging a dulled or numb mind.

To find grounded-ness and resilience in an environment of constant change— that is queerness. I want to create music and art that embodies queerness from the inside out: decentered, non-binary, structurally open, radically non-hierarchical, improvisatory, reveling in multiplicity and embracing complexity. 

Ever since I’ve been alive I’ve had this feeling of restlessness, a yearning to look beyond and search for new knowledge and experience. I live for open space, travel, capturing moments and trying to expand and preserve them. My worst fear is to be caged, enclosed, stifled: expression is an affirmation of survival, of being fully alive. My art reflects and embodies these inclinations: zooming into the moment, capturing fleeting beauty and serendipity. Sometimes it’s hard for me to let go of a moment, I try to hold on- but the same restless winds that govern me remind me that it’s always better to let go, let the infinite flow of sound, and by extension time, resume.

I am driven to create music that heals out of a need to be healed myself. I turn to music to transcend reality, rather than simply escape from it. 

What if we simply chose the parameters of sound- rather than the sounds themselves? Stoking them like embers from a fire? Cupping them like pools of water? Sifting them like a handful of sand?