My new album, “Skull Vibrations and Osseous Transmissions”, is out now on Bandcamp, Spotify, and other streaming services on what some consider the holiest of holy days, 4/20.

I’m considering it my first proper album, since the “first” one, "Singles Ready to Mingle: The First Quarter Century", was a compilation.

Listen to “Skull Vibrations and Osseous Transmissions” and read the liner notes below:

Some artists like to be mysterious and try to completely let the listener come to their own conclusions on what their songs are about. If you don't care about what an artist (and in this case, I use the term “artist” loosely) has to say about what they make, skip everything below and just listen to the album. And if you do enjoy it, check out David Byrne’s amazing book, “How Music Works”, from which I cribbed this bass-heavy album’s title.

I was languishing this past winter, so after a year of not making any music (though I did release the aforementioned compilation), I forced myself to dive back into production on 2/2/22. Fast forward a few months, and my first album proper is complete. It’s the fastest I’ve made this many songs—though the bar was set low by releasing about a song a year previously. Working on this album almost every day for months helped.

I made a concerted effort to not use samples, which I’d relied on heavily in the past. After all, sampling is how some of my favorite producers (Public Enemy’s The Bomb Squad, Jack Dangers of Meat Beat Manifesto, Kevin Martin / The Bug, and Alec Empire of Atari Teenage Riot / Digital Hardcore Recordings) built some of the tracks and albums that have inspired me most, both musically and sociopolitically.

A couple of the songs toward the end of the album have me singing. I’m not a great vocalist, so if you want to collab, hit me up. I also included instrumental versions at the end of the album.

A few songs also have bits of me playing violin. Last summer I picked the instrument up again after not having played for about three decades—I dropped it because I thought it was dorky and moved to percussion. Dumb move. Anyway, I’m not good, but I (think) I can play well enough to include a few samples of my noodling.

It’s a bit of a concept album. I wanted to portray a typical winter day in my life in my small, somewhat isolated mountain town in the Rockies, struggling with how to deal in the middle of a rapidly unfolding, massive climate crisis, and my smaller personal issues. 

In early December, a forest fire broke out three miles directly west of my house on a day when winds gusted up to 85 miles per hour. A few weeks later, the massive Marshall Fire destroyed roughly a thousand homes in the Denver suburbs and disrupted the life of a loved one. I always have my and my dogs’ bugout bags ready to go, because the aridification in the west is damn serious and getting worse.

After I put the songs together, I road tested the album in some of the real-life experiences that inspired it, mainly while driving on I-70 and downhill skiing in the Rockies. I wanted to listen to the songs as a soundtrack while experiencing the very things that I envisioned when I was producing them. 

I also produced the album so the songs would sound decent enough and be memorable enough to get the gist of even on the worst phones, or in noisy situations, like skiing or snowboarding. I wanted to make sure your brain fills in the gaps, so if you can't, for example, hear the bass—which features prominently in most of the songs—you can still hear the high end and melodies and enjoy it.

The cover photo is of a hummingbird that had been hit and killed by a driver on my street last summer.

And now for the tracks:

1. Sunrise

I’m obsessed with the sunrise. Ever since I took in one of my rescue dogs, Kaya, I’ve always gotten up at the break of dawn. Kaya forced me to wake up early when she was a puppy: She’d get rowdy like a rooster, incessantly begging me to feed her at the first instance of daylight. 

In the mountains on rare mornings when we have a few clouds, there’s typically a 5-10 minute magical window where they’re fluorescent and look like they’re on fire. 

I tried to put some of the feelings I have most mornings into this track. I often don’t want to get out of bed, but the dogs know we go for a walk up the canyon road every morning, and I feel like I’m wasting precious time if I don’t get up early. So it’s a mix of positive and negative emotions, almost every morning.

2. Aiska Fiskaday

Hearing about others’ dreams is boring for most people, so bear with me. 

A few years ago I had a dream that I was at a cliffside bar overlooking the fog-covered ocean with a mystical woman named Aiska Fiskaday (a mermaid, maybe) and some of the melody of this song stuck around in my head after I woke up.

I wanted to encapsulate the aquatic feeling of the dream and the melody. And I was listening to a lot of Kettle and Secede’s album “When Can” after hearing their song “Canned Forever” in Joost Jordens’ and Mike von Rotz’s incredible virtual reality experience, “Transition”, at Austin’s awesome Wonderspaces. The incredible production of “When Can” seeped into my brain.

I’d also been listening to Jon Hopkins’ “Music for Psychedelic Therapy”, trying to process and move past the range of difficult feelings I’d been experiencing. I’m nowhere near on par with Hopkins’ wholly immersive atmospheric production, but maybe one day.

3. I-70 Things

I-70 spans America, east to west. Stretches of it in the middle are pretty plain (I hope that’s why they call them the plains), but once you get to the mountains, well, hang on tight: I-70 in the Rockies can be a wild ride.

I-70 Things is an Instagram account that documents all the craziness that goes on across the interstate, mainly in the Colorado Rockies. I can see the highway from my living room window, and I have to take it to get pretty much anywhere. 

When there’s no traffic—which is rare—it’s fun to drive, with many steep twists and turns. But if there’s traffic—which is almost all the time—it can be a total cluster. But at least the views are pretty. 

One of the first arcade games I ever played, Outrun, let you choose your own music, which was awesome, so this song has some of that video game vibe and embodies some of the craziness that is I-70.

Also, humans are dumb: There should be a public transit rail line along the entirety of I-70. But instead, it’s just cars and trucks.

4. WOLF FLOW

This track is more of my old school, late ‘90’s production style, where I’d just create 4-bar loops I thought sounded cool, string them together, then add and delete some of the loops as the song went on.

At that time, I was heavily influenced by industrial-leaning acts: Chicago Gabber producer Delta 9, who used 909 bass kicks like no one else and combined them with thrash guitar licks and rap samples; Atari Teenage Riot, who basically did the same but added overtly political sentiment a la Public Enemy; and Nine Inch Nails—Trent Reznor is the man.

Like “Aiska Fiskaday”, this incorporates a bit of a melody I heard in a dream.

I called it WOLF FLOW because 1) I like the multi-word palindrome, and 2) I’ve always loved wolves (so much that my second tattoo is a drawing I did of a howling wolf, on my shoulder). 

More importantly, wolves—like all apex predators—are absolutely crucial to our wellbeing. And people still fear them like crazy, mainly out of ignorance. But humans are trying to decimate wolf populations through recently re-legalized, absolutely brutal hunting, as well as by cutting off the land they need to roam. They have huge territorial ranges, but in Colorado, they basically have nowhere safe to roam.

Rocky Mountain Wolf Project is an organization that is attempting to bring the wolf back to Colorado. All proceeds from this song will go to support that nonprofit’s efforts.

5. A Perfect Day

A perfect day for me is getting up before dawn (see track 1), beating the traffic to ski or hike (see track 3), spending the day exploring the mountains, and enjoying local beers throughout. But no matter how perfect a day feels to me, it seems that feelings of anxiety or depression still strike at some point. This song hits on both the highs and lows of even the best days.

6. Mountain Time

I love aggressive, bass heavy music. But as I get older, I can tolerate it in smaller and smaller doses, and I’m trying to be a calmer person, so dub—the atmospheric, drum and bass and tech-heavy subgenre of reggae—is by far the style of music I listen to most now. The bass line and slower tempo in this track is inspired by dub music. (“Aiska Fikaday” is as well.)

“Mountain Time” is a soundtrack to afternoon / early evening drives home from mountain adventures, when I’m absolutely exhausted and admiring the sunset setting the mountains aglow.

7. Dogs

I’ve listened to pop songs hundreds of thousands of times, but I still struggle with the basic structure for some reason. It’s a lot harder to write a decent pop song than I anticipated.

So I went to a track that I consider a perfect pop song, Human League’s 1981 synthpop classic “Don’t You Want Me”, and broke it down, bar by bar.

That skeleton forms the basis of “Dogs”, which turned into something informed by, if not reminiscent of, early ‘80’s Talking Heads and George Clinton. (Please don’t misunderstand this as me thinking I’m remotely on par with either of those masterful acts.) Coincidentally, after my local community radio station played it last week, I realized that the bass line that closes the track is similar to that of Talking Heads’ “Girlfriend is Better”.

I wanted to make this a funky track and envisioned my dogs bounding around, wanting to play tug and frisbee when I get home from the days when I can’t take them to share whatever fun I was having in the mountains without them.

8. Waves

This is the second song I worked on for this album. I love Pharrell Williams’ typically sparse production style, and the opening drum line has a Clipse “Grindin’” rhythm to it.

Years ago, I listened to a ton of drum’n’bass, so there’s a bit of that too, along with my so-so vocals and violin.

The lyrics are a reminder that even though you can hit some pretty damn low points in life, things usually come back up again soon. Everything’s a balance. And things often aren’t cut and dry.

(If you’re struggling with mental/emotional balance in your life, check out the Waking Up app and book by neuroscientist Sam Harris. They were game changers for my well being.)

9. Seasonal Affective Disorder (Pizza and Marijuana)

This is the first song I worked on for this album, while stuck in a deep-winter rut. 

The track was my outlet for the way I felt through most of the winter at the end of the workday: exhausted, waiting for some kind of exciting message to come through my phone from someone I cared about, endlessly (doom)scrolling, and junk food and the sun being some of the few things that seemed to keep me going.

The bridge (“I know what I need to do for you”) is based on a fragment of a song I heard in another dream I had years ago.

10. The Final Snowfall

As the most recent IPCC climate report pointed out, we’ve fucked this planet we live on, and we’ll be fucked on a massive scale sooner than later because of it. The changes are obvious and imminent, especially where I live, with long term aridity, fire danger, etc.

I savor every time it snows, recognizing that it’s happening less and less.

Thank you for listening and for reading.