“Uncanny”: a little 8-track LP I’ve recorded this September-October, pulling exclusively from tunes completed this past year. It’s been a year for some big themes: a little death, a little birth. I had just over the statutory limit of LP playtime in tunes written since last November, and a free copy of Ableton Lite I’d been putting off learning anything about. As I polished off the last tune for this package — and it was a Halloween tune, because that should be a bigger genre — the title “Uncanny” felt fitting with all the reflection on life itself, on its limits, and what we make of it.
A little note for Halloween, because that’s today: Who Goes There is our little haunting psycho-sexual closer here. I’ve always been a Halloweenhead. The supernatural, to me, poses all the same existential questions that religion does — what’s after this body, what’s there in the invisible world, who’s pulling the unseen strings — but presented as a mystery, not an answer. In that sense, it’s both delightfully anti-authoritarian, and an invitation to take these irreducible fears and approach them with a spirit of play, to make them somehow lighter and shared. That we do this as a community, that we do this with children, just seems like a really undersold tradition.
The album is now on my youtube, and will be on all streaming services within whatever technobureaucratic lag time they each impose. Listen and share, and come see me play a little hole in the wall sometime.