the process will run, even while asleep

The concept of this album is an AI computer program goes to sleep and dreams of nature. They go on a journey starting by seeing the open ocean, walking through a forest, setting sail, taking a train from a station on the water, into another forest, and falls asleep again while sinking into a creek. The album art was also made by the AI Dall-e which I won’t do often but I felt like it matched the aesthetic of the album being a journey through organic-cyber-liminal-dreamspace.

I wasn’t quite sure if I wanted to release this under Collector’s Item or now when I finished it. But I didn’t want to make an entirely new artist for this unless it’s something I start doing pretty frequently (Which I could honestly see happening but I’ll cross that bridge when it gets built).

The inspiration from this came from genres like vaporwave and kankyo ongaku. I love the feeling that vaporwave creates with an ambient and soothing feeling but still powered by driving rhythms. The concept of liminal space/dream spaces is something I’m drawn to as well. I felt like this is where the genre crosses over into kankyo ongaku when you start to consider liminal space as just: familiar spaces, void of humans. Nature itself sometimes gives a feeling of dream or liminal -like qualities. Living in New York City for the past several years, having grown up in the rainforest of Asheville NC, I missed the sounds of nature and began to hear the same minute level of detail in the resting ambient noise of both areas. I’ve discovered over the past several years that one of my favorite things to do in life is find quiet and memorable spaces and listen to the noise floor like it’s music.

And that’s what I did for most of these songs, I found places in Asheville and NYC and recorded the noise floor with a portable binaural microphone. I actually walked around a forest with the microphone in my hands for the second track “walking through the forest, my head in my hands.” Most of the ambience recordings have physical microphone motion in them until the end with the creek sounds.

For “on a train, running over the water,” I took the A train at a time when almost nobody would be riding it out to Far Rockaway and recorded the section of the ride that goes over the water. I love that part of the A track. It’s so soothing, you can even hear the announcements and train ding when we got to the next stop. It cosmically matched the timing and key of the song that was already mostly finished by the time it was added.