Today Is Tomorrow
A new 10-track Aspetuck album + musings on flowers, playing live & studio workflow
The bird’s-foot trefoil - a tiny, unassuming yellow flower that peppers the ground everywhere I look. It could easily be confused for something else, maybe my daughter’s favorite the buttercup, or could be mistaken for a dandelion from afar. I wasn’t aware of this bird’s-foot trefoil when I took the below photo, alongside a pond at my parent’s house in Vermont last summer. I later used that same image for the cover of my new album ‘Today Is Tomorrow’.
I had heard that flower’s name before, somewhere in one of the books I like reading to my daughter at bedtime. These days my head is full of bits & pieces of Disney songs & snippets of text from bedtime stories - life with a 4 year old. So of course my subconscious has the names of characters from various kids books floating around it as well. I found myself looking back at that photo I’d taken of the little yellow flower from time to time. I’ve always really loved the serenity of it. I wondered what kind of flower it was at one point, so I did a reverse image search out of curiosity. The ‘bird’s-foot trefoil’ pops up on Google & my brain goes “wait hey, remember that from that Else Beskow book?!”
It’s basically a weed, a perennial wildflower that’s omnipresent where we live in upstate New York, or as wikipedia eloquently calls it - favored forage for livestock. I took the photo last summer by chance at my parent’s house in Vermont on a peaceful Sunday. It was completely spontaneous & part of a collection of shots I took as artwork options to go along with my mix for Deep Breakfast Series. The bird’s-foot trefoil didn’t make the cut but had I not honed in on that flower that day, I don’t think I’d be noticing them everywhere I walk this summer. I certainly wouldn’t have made the funny connection to that book, & my daughter wouldn’t be pointing them out everywhere we go. I’ve developed a slight obsession with flowers over the years, especially these seemingly ordinary ones that pop up around the middle of summer, anywhere & everywhere you look. I took some photos of flowers in Albania that I’ve always been very fond of - for my Nonsense Machine release + this Far Blue mix from Lord Of The Isles. I love the symmetry of flowers & the contrast of their bright color up against stark backdrops. They’re these constant little reminders of beauty throughout your day that can survive all of the unpredictable weather & conditions that get sent their way. I also love when the things I create find these little connections between each other, memories & moments all interwoven & intertwined.
My new Aspetuck album ‘Today Is Tomorrow’ materialized back in the spring of 2024, right around the same time I’d taken that photo. I had just sent a 30-minute video snippet of a live set to Jongmin of Oslated - a South Korean digital record label that I’ve been working with for a couple of years now. The video was the very beginning of a 3+ hour set I played with my friend Âsan at our Delayed barn gathering, which happens twice a year in the mountains of upstate New York. Most of the audio from that night was unusable though; it was our first time playing together & my first live set ever. The set was a bit messy, overly dynamic & lacked cohesion between our yin & yang sounds. The recording ended up clipping / distorting too much for it to be listenable, but wow… we played 3 hours live together & it was fully improvised. That experience unlocked something in our heads. It was a unique feeling, something we’d both been curious about, as we’re both majorly inspired by Circle Of Live & we both participated in Sebastian Mullaert’s wonderful & highly recommended Circle Of Live “In Bloom” program. It was a moment & an immense learning experience as well as the very beginning of our friendship. Jongmin heard something in that short snippet of the recording we had sent over. The section we used was fully ambient / beatless for the most part. The audio was clean compared to the rest of the recording & it was the first ‘chapter’ of the set - the beginnings of us finding our way, patiently listening to each other, trying ideas & being fully present. Jongmin decided to upload the 30-minute clip to the Oslated YouTube channel (link to the video here if you’re curious).
Oddly enough in the most serendipitous of ways, that recording is what led to us getting booked at the 15-year anniversary edition of La Nature Festival in Belgium, which happened just over a week ago.
It took me a long time to fully process everything from our experience in Belgium. It went by so quickly.. at one moment we’re counting down the days, as we spend back to back to back weekends together jamming in my studio, making sounds, refining things, even doing a full test run in a venue nearby. Then the next moment, we blink & we’re there in the booth playing bird sounds for the birds on the soundsystem of all soundsystems from Lambda Labs, completely ecstatic. We were lucky enough to be given the opportunity to debut our new live project, ‘As We Dissolve’ for friends new & old, with a 3-hour improvised live set in the middle of the most magical Belgian forest. The project wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for this festival. One of the organizers, our friend Julien pictured in between us below, discovered that video on the Oslated YouTube & reached out. That moment, from the video of us at the barn, became the foundation for how we approached playing live together at La Nature - patiently entering the musical unknown with a childlike curiosity, listening to each other, communicating & having fun. Just over 1 year after our first live set together, I can confidently say that we are feeling grateful & full of purpose with the start of this new project, thanks to Jongmin & thanks to Julien. I’m just in awe at the beauty of these funny little moments in life, nexus points as my dear friend Geert refers to them - people, places, things, ideas & creations that bring you from point A to B.
After that video went up last summer, Jongmin kindly asked me for some new music. I had done an album called Inanimate Distraction Object on his label back in 2022 & it felt like the right time to do another with him. I was finishing up a ton of work at the time so I quickly sent him a playlist of 70 demos. He responded saying it was way too much music (it was) & asked that I refine the playlist into a more realistic amount. I don’t know why I gave him so much music, but I guess it just comes down to trust. The people in this scene who I feel very lucky to know, are all connected in my mind by this one common thread - trust & mutual respect. With Jongmin & Oslated, I feel like I can be my most open & vulnerable artistic self. I’m happy for him to hear anything & everything I’m working on. At the same time though, he believes in me to deliver something that is truly me & trusts that I’ll find my way there. That playlist of 70 tracks was eventually distilled into a playlist of 10, which I sent over to him & he immediately responded saying he’d like to release these 10 tracks as my next album, no questions asked. Fast forward a year later & here we are.
I’ve always felt this incredible support from Jongmin. I admire his label, his ear & his steadfast, uncompromising vision so much. He has been a major influence on me in so many ways - helping to spark various friendships & connections around the world that have gotten me to where I am today.
Anyway, a little bit about the music - some of the tracks on the album go all the way back to 2020 (Acrophase & Sunny Conditions), but the majority of them were made in the first couple of months of 2024. A handful of them represent some new workflow / arrangement techniques involving a more tactile approach to music-making that I’ve been inching towards. Knascam, Model D Loop & The Week Is Ours originated from various modular / analog gear recordings that I then performed live using midi controllers. This playing & recording the structure of a track live technique was something I hadn’t really explored before then & it opened up a whole new world for me. With every track I make, I try to inject more & more of a human touch into my workflow. The ultimate goal is to be able to get full tracks straight out of my modular system that are fully mixed, processed & arranged by hand, without the need for too much post-processing / chopping inside of Ableton after the fact. I have a long way to go in that respect but I’m really enjoying the beginnings of that journey.
Echolocation is a great example of this more tactile approach. All of the individual stems of the track are recordings of me just playing around with various pieces of gear in my studio (the above clip is from the day most of it was recorded). The recordings were then refined & performed live using my AtoVproject 16n faderbank with all of the volumes of the stems in the Ableton project mapped to each fader, so I could bring things in & out however I wanted, kind of in the way dub music is done. The end result is a track that is almost like two tracks in one & makes for a great intro track since it starts quite patiently without drums then builds & builds with some unexpected moments. My physical hand movements are baked into the DNA of the track (and all of the tracks on this album really), which is something I think gives the music a less predictable nature, & something I really crave in music I listen to myself. In Model D Loop there are some longer recordings of me playing with my Moog Matriarch & its beautiful built-in delay. In Knascam, I’m running an unknown sound source (don’t remember) into the Knas Moisturizer & playing with the filter & spring reverb by hand, which was I believe an insert on my Tascam M-106 mixer - hence the name Knascam. To Catch A Falling Leaf was a very organic & spontaneous all-modular jam that happened one time when I was trying out a new module. I don’t quite recall how some of the other tracks were done, mainly because they were finished over a longer period of time. I often will redo / remix old ideas in a couple of different ways until I got somewhere with them.
Somehow these 10 tracks all sonically fit together in my mind despite coming from different times, techniques & approaches. The original intent wasn’t necessarily for these 10 tracks to become an album. To me they were just snapshots of time, or diary entries as I like to refer to them, but when Jongmin wanted them as a new album, I was all for it. It has been sitting on the shelf for a little while now & I’m so happy it’s finally out there. I hope you like it :)
‘Today Is Tomorrow’ is out now on Bandcamp.
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