This is a tough one for me to write about, as this, along with Silver and Weight, represent a particular dark and desperate time for me. I feel as though anything I say will be somehow both far too little and far too much. In short: in February 2015, my friend and mentor, Mark Trayle, died at the age of 60, and I didn’t take it well. This was followed shortly by an attempted but ultimately-abortive move to an unspecified mountain town, in the wake of which I found myself psychologically shattered.
This was probably the point in my life where “music-making as therapy” made the most sense to me - it wasn’t about getting cool results, or about developing techniques, or even necessarily about expressing anything. Rather, it was just about finding something to do that wasn’t sitting there, staring blankly into space. Of course, in hindsight I’ve been able to discern the bits that are expressive of what I was going through, and can even see that I managed to develop some new techniques along the way, but in the months of making these tracks, it wasn’t about any of that, and was really a way to survive.
For me, Closure is most obviously “dark” of what would end up being, along with Silver and Weight, the trilogy of albums made in this period (all three are assemblages of tracks from the same giant pool of stuff that I made, mostly while sitting on the couch with the shades drawn, wishing I had a/c). From the ominous and medieval-sounding opening, to the James Ellroy interview excerpt at the end, it’s not a sunny picture I painted here, and mercifully not one I feel quite represents my outlook at the present, but it is an absolutely stark look at where I was at then, and remains a difficult listen for me, though not an unrewarding one.
Cover image by Michael Keusch.
This was probably the point in my life where “music-making as therapy” made the most sense to me - it wasn’t about getting cool results, or about developing techniques, or even necessarily about expressing anything. Rather, it was just about finding something to do that wasn’t sitting there, staring blankly into space. Of course, in hindsight I’ve been able to discern the bits that are expressive of what I was going through, and can even see that I managed to develop some new techniques along the way, but in the months of making these tracks, it wasn’t about any of that, and was really a way to survive.
For me, Closure is most obviously “dark” of what would end up being, along with Silver and Weight, the trilogy of albums made in this period (all three are assemblages of tracks from the same giant pool of stuff that I made, mostly while sitting on the couch with the shades drawn, wishing I had a/c). From the ominous and medieval-sounding opening, to the James Ellroy interview excerpt at the end, it’s not a sunny picture I painted here, and mercifully not one I feel quite represents my outlook at the present, but it is an absolutely stark look at where I was at then, and remains a difficult listen for me, though not an unrewarding one.
Cover image by Michael Keusch.