November 7 2022

It is around this point of our yearly cycle in which I find myself at my lowest points of psycho-emotional stability:
every trough feels yet deeper than the last.
With a capricious yet imposing timing, mercurial temperaments of listless melancholy transform into manic & short-sighted suicidal ideation.
I am so tired of living my life like this—being perceived as I am by others around me.
I find no passion nor joy in schoolwork, and any such pleasure must be forcefully wrung out of music.
With that said, I am pleased to report that I am making solid progress on my next project
& I would like to share some more information about it with you.

Laurels of the End of History is looking to be about 10-15 minutes long & I am very excited
to announce that it will be mixed, mastered, and co-produced by Anna Lily.
I’m looking at an early 2023 release. It will feature instrumental work from Anna herself,
as well as Farkas Aron (AKA Composition Booklet), [redacted], Loto, and others yet to be announced. September 20th 2022

It's ok that people have completely misunderstood the point of my album. It's ok that they don't like it.
Where I begin to take issues, however, is when people make their disliking of my album a matter of culture or authencitity.
I have put more thought and work into this project than these people could ever know, they scrape the surface
of my themes for superficial criticisms and then have the nerve to say things like "it is lost in translation" or
"the passion is obviously there, it just comes across as a superficial impersonation." You don't even know what this
album is about in the first place. Your critical media analysis begins and ends with the title of the album and a quick
glance through the lyrical content. But none of these people when they engage with my album critically dare to touch any
of the album which is not historical, but is instead about me, about nearly dying, about transitioning, about discovering
myself. They don't stop and think; the tagline "a story of two halves told in three parts about one People shattered into seven
and one Person taping themselves back together" wasn't chosen haphazardly. The release date wasn't chosen haphazardly. The lyrical
content wasn't chosen haphazardly. I don't want to hear claims of impersonation when these people cannot even bother to contemplate
about what is really being said. Instead, they pontificate amongst themselves, poking fun until it's time to move on. None of these
people ever bother to engage in a conversation with me, because they know they're in the wrong at the end of the day.
These people could never begin to comprehend the care and passion that went behind every single thought going into this project &
they either do not anticipate or fear vulnerability and authencitity in music. And in this regard, they simply prove a huge facet of
my album correct. With time, these people will become more and more of a minority. Eventually, its time will come. It's just unfortunate
to see something I put every fiber of my being into be discarded like this. They are not ready, and that is ok.
I know what I have, I know what I made, I know what it's worth. It is not my fault many are too stupid to see it. They lack empathy
and despite an outward dogmatism, see music as nothing more than entertainment for their consumption and discardment.
Listen, rate, move on. Listen, rate, move on.


February 7, 2023

Happy anniversary to the founding of cime.casa! Thank you for sticking with me for this long :)

Originally written on January 19, 2023

The invention of barbed wire was one of the most important and consequential events in the
United States' development of and expansion into the West. While fences existed and were
used to mark private land, keep livestock within a specified area, and keep unwanted
trespassers out, they were prone to natural damage over time and would need to be replaced,
with potential losses from a faulty or broken fence being devastating, particularly if the fences
are being used to keep livestock within their bounds. Barbed wire was cheaper than fence, was
not prone to natural wearing, and was easier to install. However, there was a very distinct
and defining purpose between fences of old and barbed wire of present. Fences are meant only to protect,
while barbed wire, while also protecting something, is also meant to harm & punish
those who challenge its presence. With a simple change, Man's relationship with nature
changed from one defined by veneration & respect to hostility as the west grew.

The cowboys died alone and divided.


Originally written on February 3, 2023

As we venture further into the third decade of the 21st century, we reach and promptly fly past
the milestone of a century since the 1920s. A fact that seems rather passe, but is, in fact,
monumental to the history of music. The 20s saw the perfection of the design of the
microphone, leading to not the beginning of recorded music but the beginning of its
cultural significance through radio and shellac records. A century out, we are in a peculiar
situation where we see an unfettered availability to recordings, compositions, video footage, etc. from
any point in music history, but as is the case with literally everything else upon the development
of the internet, none of this knowledge became easier to engage with or “freed” from the
Information Superhighway. In reality, all it’s done is pile even more shit for us to wade through.
With copyright limiting transformative usage of much of this as well, it’s no wonder that a lot of
this music remains locked in the past for one reason or another.

With this in mind, something like the release of Buena Vista Social Club seems like a
miracle–which is it! 70-90 year old musicians recording folk/jazz songs from decades that, even
back then, were long past. Coming out in the 90s, as a point of comparison, where the last
World War I documentary that featured living veteran interviews were released. These are
compositions every musician on the record had held with them for their entire lives, and without
the chance encounter and opportunity to record it with modern audio production equipment and
techniques, there’s a good chance that they would have, if they were even lucky enough to have
recorded them, stayed trapped on old 20s and 30s shellacs. I’ve been listening to a good deal of
music from this era for inspiration/studying old, mostly defunct genres of music. They work,
they’re sometimes not even that bad, but it’s a travesty nonetheless. None of these are truly
“preserved” in my opinion, a criteria which can only be met when media is readily available to be
engaged with in its intended form. Poor fidelity recordings simply are not that and, if there was a
choice offered to these artists at the time, none of them would have gone for it.

They are available, which I previously said, but not accessible to the Layman or the curious;
engaging with old music, more often than not, feels like walking in a dark cave. This has much
to do with poor documentation. The fact is, most people don’t care to write about recorded
music until the 50s with few transcendent exceptions, such as Pete Seeger, Ella Fitzgerald,
Great American Songbook composers like Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, or
foundational jazz legends like Louis Armstrong, Django Reinhardt, Duke Ellington, etc.,
which are, of course, such a small, small portion of the incredible variety of music from that era. A
huge number of acts and recordings remain functionally lost, leaving us with hardly anything
resembling a corpus to meaningfully analyze, take inspiration from, modernize, recontextualize,
or deconstruct–which only becomes more difficult to accomplish with the presence of copyright
laws. Folk music as a genre persists to this day, but like fences and barbed wire killed the
vaquero, copyright and the triumph of the individual songwriter over communal spirit killed the
troubadour.