The Beginning of the End of Your Pain took me about two years to make and is compiled from hundreds of different modulated samples (some borrowed, some created), field recordings, found sounds, a juno60 synthesizer, loops, and improvised live performances. The title comes from an old chiropractic pamphlet I saw years ago in a doctor’s office. This album started as an experiment I used to unwind after work while I was living in Brooklyn in early 2017. I was working in the Mexican Summer Records warehouse with my friend Jake Pepper. He opened my ears to so much new music. I was inspired by this windfall of influence and became fixated with creating sounds that felt unfamiliar. At night I would sit on the floor of my apartment and run music from a cellphone into my pedal board to capture loops and morph the music into something that felt new. I found this to be a soothing exercise and often fell asleep while doing it. This resulted in sounds and recordings that I didn’t even remember making because I often had created them while drifting off to sleep. This was very exciting. I became obsessed with this serendipitous, semiconscious sound foraging and after doing it for a few months, I had about 500 recordings totalling around 80 hours of material that I then began to sift through.

I organized and uploaded select snippets into a spd555 sampler and two different loopers. I then started what I guess would be considered the “songwriting” process. This consisted of experimenting with different loop combinations, different triggering patterns, and different effect chains to make the ideas to flow together seamlessly. I drafted up diagrams and charts as guides that indicated which sample pads got triggered at what point, when and which effects to engage and disengage, and how to move between songs. After about 25 iterations, I finally settled on what would finally become the general form of the album. At this point it was late 2017, I had moved to Philadelphia and began rehearsing how to play the record live.

Almost every night that winter I would play through the album in its entirety, tweaking tracks here and there and finding textures that felt new and exciting to me. The focus of the record remained creating atmospheres that sounded simultaneously alien and nostalgic. By May of 2018 I felt ready to record the album and asked my friend Drew to engineer it. I decided the only way to capture the sound that I wanted was to play it live in a single take like I had been doing to practice. So with Drew at the controls and me hunched over my gear, my charts, and a stopwatch to keep me in time we did a play through of the entire record and got it right on the first shot. I spent another six months poring over the track stems, teasing out frequencies, and mixing everything to fit together just right. Drew mastered it and glued the whole thing together. The cover art is from a few photographs I took in the jellyfish room at the Monterey Bay Aquarium that I layered on top of eachother. The album is meant to be listened to all at once just like how it was recorded and looks to find calm in the chaos that constantly surrounds everything around us. Making this record was a really special experience for me and I wanted to share the story behind it

All proceeds for this record will be donated to Ocean Conservancy. Thanks for listening.