Refuge

The title Refuge reflects a lot of the different feelings and thoughts that went into making this record what it is. In an immediate sense, this project has been a major source of personal comfort, energy, and strength for me over the course of the last year and a half, the period over which I composed the songs on Refuge. The burden of my professional duties of teaching and writing a dissertation has weighed very heavily on me these last few years amidst the onslaught of ecological catastrophe, human cruelty, economic disempowerment, and epidemiological confinement that have come to define our troubled times.

When I first entered academia, I was driven by an activist hope that by working to transform how we think and teach about human culture in the university I could do my part to contribute to a broader transformation of how our society engages with cultural difference. I still hold on to a sliver of this hope, and remain as convinced as ever that the university is a place where compassion is in constantly high demand. However, in most ways I’ve profoundly lost my faith in my ability to have a meaningful impact on the large-scale systems and fatal human flaws that have put us on track towards almost inconceivable ecological and social ruin. It is less clear to me now than ever before in my life that what I have been doing with my adult life has been worth anything in the overall scheme of things, and that is a paralyzing feeling to have at the stage in your career when you are expected to show even more investment in your research project and even more commitment to your professional development than ever before. Don’t worry, Mom: I’m still going to hit my deadlines, and I still am excited about bringing my dissertation project to full fruition and starting off my career as a professional scholar-educator. But in these times in which I feel such deep, painful disappointment in the present and future of our human race, I have found myself returning again and again to the refuge of art to find meaning.

Refuge is not a denial of these truths of our times. Perhaps you could see it as a kind of strategic retreat from existential ruination at the hands of things I could never hope to control. By focusing on the act of artistic creation amidst social decay and destruction, I hope to marshal my strength for the unknown future, when I may need to draw from my strength in ways I never would have expected. However, in its truest sense a refuge is not just a space away from danger, but also a space characterized by safety and freedom. No matter how deluded and pointless it sometimes feels to work a hard job in a burning world, for me music remains a space where I can find meaning that can never be eroded by the casual cruelties of our world. In music I can play- not just in the sense of having fun, but in the sense that the psychologist D.W. Winnicott talked about play: as a state of mental flow, in which one feels simultaneously creatively empowered and unencumbered by potential barriers to action. I fall on the steps of this refuge in the times when I feel my strength wane, and I have survived off the shelter and strength that it has given.

Refuge is a celebration of this strength, and I see it overall as a project of un-ironic joy, something that surprised me a bit when I looked back at the pains of the creative process. Even though music and art are my refuges from the most difficult and draining parts of life, I sometimes let my passion for my art itself become vicious, and at points in the creative process leading up to this record I found myself trying to tear down everything I had built for not being good enough, not being worth hearing, not sounding like professional music. I first went public with my art-making several years ago in large part to drown out these vicious voices of mine: by sharing my art with other people, I can also remind myself to honor the meaning and value I see in it myself, even when the flaws I see in it threaten to poison my experience of the piece entirely.

I have found this especially important in today’s digital media culture, in which so much of what we consume is the product of exhaustive behind-the-scenes work by many people. When we consume so much painstakingly perfected content, it becomes so easy to become alienated from the creative process: with all these brilliant artists already out there, why should we bother making art of our own? Refuge is my reminder to myself that the joy of expression is unconditional, and that the work I have put into this project is worth sharing and celebrating even on days when I hear every way I could have equalized better, or chosen different snare samples, or just given up entirely and cut my losses. Refuge is also my way of celebrating how far I’ve come: I am releasing this project because I believe it is worth hearing, and that fact in itself feels almost incomparably enriching after years dreaming about creating music I could connect to as a listener as much as an artist.

I have been drawn to electronic music since the late days of grade school, when I first fell in love with how richly a well-crafted digital tone could fill out a piece of music. Since then, something has always been deeply alluring to me about the creative possibilities of electronic music. Although sub-genres of electronic music like EDM are infamous for their over-reliance on production gimmicks to hide their musical simplicity, electronic music has also at times been at the forefront of musical innovation. In contrast to genres of music with set conventions of acoustic instrumentation (e.g., the standard rock quartet of vocals, guitar, bass, and drums or the jazz quartet of brass, piano, bass, and drums), the pallet of sounds electronic music chooses from is expansive and varies widely by sub-genre. There is a stunningly large pool of possible sources of sound to choose from, spanning a wide range of analog and software synthesizers, prerecorded sounds, software plugins and effects, and anything else that makes noise. Refuge uses software synthesizers, software plugins, musical samples, vocal samples, and foley sounds across its nine tracks, a common mix of sources in electronic music production. Digital manipulation through plugins and synthesizer configurations exponentially increases the range of possible sound that can be drawn out from these sources. The overall sound of Refuge reflects years of work tinkering with synthesizer settings and learning how to use filters and plug-ins to add meaningful sonic elements to my compositions.

Rhythm is often what first draws me to a piece of music and keeps me invested as music develops. In addition to drawing from electronic genres like house, footwork, and drum and bass, my rhythmic aesthetic in Refuge also culls from jazz, hip-hop, and go-go, other genres of music that have been steady presences in my headphones since my teenage years. Although Refuge is well-suited for headphone listening, I imagine the tracks on Refuge in a club-style concert space, in the spirit of DC’s dearly departed U Street Music Hall, where rhythm is an imposing sonic presence. It is in these intimate spaces where sound hits hardest and rhythm is at its most visceral, and these are the moments in which I have felt the refuge of music open up inside my very flesh and bones. In Refuge I have tried to integrate my love of rhythm with my growth as a melodic musician. Refuge contains melodies that for me capture the excitement, playfulness, and depth of feeling that this record represents. I am profoundly proud to offer Refuge as an account of both an artistic and a personal journey, as well as an affirmation of the creation and growth that the future invites, no matter how hopeless it might be. It would mean the world to me if you give this record a listen so that I can share with you my refuge.

Listen to Refuge on Bandcamp, Spotify, YouTube, iTunes, and Apple Music.