turn the corner consists of three experimental, drone, and ambient pieces i made using electroacoustic methods over a week in july 2017. for me, turn the corner is an album about fear, identity, displacement, guilt, liminality, and change.

as always i dedicate this album to my sweetest dearest screwtape. baby, ive tried to kick you out, but i guess we're in this together.

the pieces are not mastered yet. i would like to do that, but don't have the money for it right now.

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in july 2017 i went to alfred, ny to attend a week-long workshop on sound at the university there. my dad and i drove there together. i didn't really know what to expect, but the course description said analog synths so i figured i'd enjoy it regardless. the classes started and we learned all about synths, field recordings, additive and subtractive synthesis, but mainly i had the opportunity to experiment in a studio for long hours with the support of a teacher and fellow students should i have any questions.

two days after the course started i felt i started to get in a groove. i took a tascam field recorder and recorded myself singing 10 or 12 folk songs i had written at the time on my guitar. i started processing those files in digital software and sort of deconstructing the melodies into layers and loops and drones.

you can't live here anymore is a line of a chorus of a song i wrote but when i discovered the line featured in the song on turn the corner i felt something in my body. the feeling of hearing the spirit of the line of that song in the real world with recorded sound that i had only heard in my head.

the drone of echo on main street is the last 20 minutes of a 55 minute improvisation i did late on my third night there. i think it was like 2am and i had been working since 9am the day prior. the drone was created using just a field recording i recorded earlier that day. the unfiltered field recording is the first 15 or 20 seconds of the track. i felt there was something special in that improv so i turned off all the lights in the studio and listened back to the whole thing. during the last 14 minutes i started singing. it took me a little while to track down a microphone and set it up in a studio i was mostly unfamiliar with. but after half an hour, i had a mic set up, and i played the last 14 minutes of the improv through headphones and improvised words and singing. the lines that mainly came through were "he ruins lives back home" "i see the picture follow me back home"
i then took that vocal track and processed it through echo and a comb filter. i had been thinking all week about folk music and rock music, but after i finished the song i walked outside and stood on the corner outside the building that looked at the main street in alfred and it was really really quiet. i looked at the stop light, and the houses, and the occasional car going by. the idea of a 60s pop rock song called like main street jive or main street jig came to me, and for me the piece felt similar in feeling to a early rock pop song, but different the way a negative image is different and the same than the developed photo.

the last piece was an improv with a field recording of me playing guitar. sort of an homage to banshee beat by animal collective, a song that's very important and sentimental to me. both songs to me are about the tenderness of pain and the pain of love and the fear of pain.

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