About Me

My Process

my process is very playful, exploratory, and iterative. every time i sit down to write or just play, i feel like a kid in a candy store that's inside of a bigger candy store. i'll often start by just playing around with different ideas, sounds, instruments, and effects until something clicks or feels right.

sometimes i'll find the core idea of a song in one session and sometimes i only get a piece of it. but once i do, i revisit it over and over until i get a feel for what needs to be added, changed, or removed. some songs take shape over weeks and some take months or years for me to find what's there and then shape it into something i want to share.

Generative Art, NOT generative AI

from Terry Riley's "in C" to Brian Eno's classic Ambient albums to modern music in video games, generative art and systems have had a history and impact in art and music that goes back long before the word 'generative' was adopted by the AI industry.

i've personally been using generative systems in my songwriting for many years now. these can be as simple as the Eno-style tape loop systems of Light: A Generative Album to the extremely complex modular-style patches with logic gates and self-adjusting variables in Rain Song and Sun Song.

creating and working with generative music systems is a bit more like song-gardening than songwriting. you put a lot of theory and craft into every individual part of the system.. but once you hit Play, the music starts to move and grow all on its own, driven entirely by the input, rules, and parameters that you've built into the system. in generative art, the system itself is the actual work of art.

there's something very fun and satisfying in building a system and having it surprise you.