Thank you for agreeing to the interview! Your latest record, Excellent Traveller, was on repeat for us over these past weeks. The album feels like an otherworldly journey, but also grounded and introspective in its song structures and melodies. Strangely, I am reminded of an old record of Apache Native American field recordings that I purchased—its songs about the immaterial are similar in their melodic progressions and rhythms, and rich with underlying meaning and intention. How has meaning and intention in music inspired your creative process?
I find my life to be meaningful, and others lives to be meaningful, and so many endless things within them meaningful, and all the sound they make, and the sound that people and things make on planet Earth and beyond — part of the intention of this record is to honor and highlight and magnify all of that through creating more music with that music, through the guitar.
There’s a cataloging/archival element to it too, as I’m further playing and manipulating the recorded realities and sounds around me. I wanted it to be something you could return to and continually find details, a type of journal, or sonic photo-book, and also something to have on in your space for however you wanted to listen. The album as a place to visit.
Mixing acoustic and electronic textures give the album’s sonic landscape a richness that is organic, yet strange and idiosyncratic. I hear new details with each listen, wondering, “Is this a recording, or am I listening to a new live, improvisational performance?” I can’t untangle whether certain moments were planned or happy accidents caught on tape! How much preparation went towards the live performance versus compiling these moments into a cohesive movement afterwards?
A lot of times, the samples dictated how I was going to go about making music with them. I would search through recordings or sessions, or remember something specific from a concert I recorded that I knew could be fertile for a potential new creation, and start from there. Some songs have samples with a lot of melodic/rhythmic/environmental information in them, so by playing them with the guitar, I could create a lot of sound by doing very little. Songs like “Sound Within Sound”, “I Am In The Fire Place”, “Watershed, in Oakland”, “Excellent Traveler Theme”, are purely one-take live performances where everything is all happening at once, without any overdubs or editing. I didn’t prepare to record them except to live my whole life up to that moment, and trust my intuition and reactions to create and compose with the samples on the spot. As I’m searching through my gathered collection of samples, I’m listening and feeling for inspiration, and once it starts I ride the wave and create with the sound and around it, and explore it, revealing paths along the way, and I record all of this while I’m doing it — the sample searching, the exploration, the moments of inspiration/discovery, everything. I always want to have that first moment of connection recorded.
I am learning to have a relationship with judgment, which often means not judging at all. I am interested in expressing. I have to immediately learn how to play the sample as its own new “instrument.” I’ve had a lot of practice doing it live with various groups I’ve been recording and touring with. This live-sampling-midi-guitaring technique has been happening on records for a couple years now, and Excellent Traveler is a concentrated and expansive version of it.
As far as live performance vs compiling and editing, there’s good representation of all of that on the album, and also a lot of other approaches. One thing I like is continuing the spontaneous creativity and freedom with a fluid editing and production process. I wanted there to be totally solo guitar pieces on the album, but I wasn’t precious about it all having to be that way. It’s more about the guitar being the expressive lens that everything goes through, and keeping freedom and imagination at the forefront, and that means being free to do whatever I want to do to make something how I want it to sound and feel. There are songs on the album where I’m editing together multiple improvisations, sometimes from the same expression, and sometimes from totally different pieces from different places and times, including the expressions of others, to create a whole piece. I’ll also go further and highlight or magnify or decorate certain compositional or textural moments with post production, which can blur the line between spontaneous creation and a through composed piece. I like that feeling of not knowing how something was made. In Infinite Palaces of Possibility / Horse, there was something in the main flute/drum machine sample that sounded like it could be the first two notes of a melody, so I kind of expanded or extended the information that I was hearing in the sample into a full melody that I added in later. Things like that.
Any tracks that took notably longer to conceptualize and finish?
Once I had the idea for the album, it all took shape relatively quickly. It was just exciting to blow the roof off what a solo guitar album could be. I had my self imposed prompt to make a solo guitar album with samples of my entire life and beyond, so after coming up with that, it was about following inspiration and imagination and making a lot of music with whatever and whoever I was interacting with and sampling to put an album together with.
With access to samplers and digital audio workstations, the practice of layering sounds in a collage, or Musique concrète, is common; however, your use of a midi guitar as the medium for performing and layering this album’s recordings is unprecedented. You are a multi-instrumentalist who plays many styles of music; why choose the guitar, specifically, for crafting this exploratory tale of infinite possibilities?
Guitar is the instrument I’ve spent the most time with. I can express a lot with the guitar and I love guitars. I also want to attempt to do unique things with it in my lifetime. The state of guitar in 2024 is interesting because so much has been done with it, and so much has been attempted and covered, and so many people have heard and continue to hear what it can do. But life happens and things in life change and evolve, and there’s space to imagine how things could be, and the technology within guitars and surrounding guitars and music and beyond is always getting updated … new inventions, and different possibilities open up … I wanted to see what would happen if I used the guitar as a Universe Creator, a Possible Reality Accelerator, Reality Refractor, and also as a kind of Center of Universes, and the prism through which all information could come through. By doing this album with a guitar, some things happened that wouldn’t have happened with another other instrument in this role. Guitar is so tactile and detailed, and when you apply the nature of the instrument to working with midi and samplers and guitar synthesizers, a lot of in-between and unexpected things can happen which are unique to this set up.
The acoustic sounds of your electric guitar sometimes provide a reminder (or reference) of the player behind the scenes, whose picking created this intriguing, textured wall of sound. What inspired the inclusion of the acoustic plucks through the electronic and sampled sounds?
You nailed it with your question — I wanted to have moments to remind the listener of what is happening and how it’s being done, that it is being created by a musician in real time. I felt including the string sound of the electric guitar gave certain moments some perspective that added to the listening experience. Other times on the album, I wanted to lean into the stark quality of the sounds without the string sound. I included a mix of strings and no strings throughout the album.
I got the idea because I often record myself with my phone on my knee as I’m working out ideas on the guitar, with music or guitar-played samples playing through speakers in the background. Listening back to the voice memo recording, you can hear this very close and intimate string sound because the electric guitar strings are so quiet and close to the mic, and then there’s this massive world of sound in the background from the speakers. I thought that combination was cool and wanted to incorporate a version of it into the album. Sometimes I would actually do that, and close record the electric guitar strings with my phone or a Zoom H2 or a Neumann U87, with the guitar-played samples also being heard through the speakers in the room, as well as recording it direct, and blend it in the mix.
I can hear the acoustic guitar occasionally; why choose those moments, specifically, to include organic instrumentation in the album?
There is instrumentation like this throughout the album, though it is all as played through the electric midi-guitar. Except for a couple minutes in the middle of Infinite Palaces of Possibility / Horse, where there is a live trio recording with Carlos Niño and André 3000.
I notice there are a few references to surfing—e.g., “Surfing in Manhattan”, “Continually Cresting”. How does surfing connect with your creative narrative?
Being in the ocean, riding waves, actual water waves and life waves, big waves and micro waves, currents and tides — all of these terms feel like music making, and all of life. Like, a moment is happening, I’m riding that wave, now. I feel good in the ocean, and connected.
I want your perspective on this take. The record spans so many styles and sounds, which, perhaps by design, makes it impossible to categorize! It’s a sonic tapestry made up of many microscopic threads from your past. In a way, Excellent Traveler is a personal experience: the listeners are viewing your soul through an auditory window, but imposing their own biases as they interpret what’s inside. Art is almost always repurposed and distorted through the biased lens of the beholder(s).
Yes. I have all this meaning for why I make this record, all these directly personal moments of my life, connections with people and places, made even more personal because I played them and expressed them further with the guitar, and then, someone else will come to the album and have their own totally unique experiences. It’s meaningful for me to put everything I am into my creations, and I also accept and support when people have their own experience with it. It’s even going to mean something different to me in the future that I’m not totally aware of yet.
You refrain from categorizing yourself or the art that you make. I find that using genres or categorical descriptions can help frame someone’s understanding of the general “vibe” of an album or musician. To that end, what music inspires you and how would you describe that work (or musician) to others in a way that they can understand, while avoiding using categories that may box those musicians into preconceptions about those categories?
I feel you relating to genres, they can be useful in that way. I just don’t like to put a lid on what I’m doing, cause it’s more expansive and intimate than that, and it’s more interesting to consider what I’m doing with different and more personally relevant creative descriptors. There’s a whole list on the back cover of the Excellent Traveler vinyl. Sometimes I’ll just describe how it feels to make the music. Like, intensity with a sense of exploration, passion, discovery, a sonic diary, traveling, Ears As Eyes … there’s so many ways to describe what’s happening beyond genre naming.
I’m inspired by any creation that reminds me “you can do anything.” Only limited by imagination. Openness. I’m inspired by a lot, the way some things are, the way they could be, imagining incredible futures, new ideas. There’s a lot there, and I’m into my music and my whole essence representing those possible realities. I love musicians, film makers, painters, actors, authors, friends, partners, collaborators, anyone or anything that’s into that.
Hypothetical scenario: someone listens to your record and achieves nirvana. They understand the ultimate meaning to life and have an all-knowing view into the processes that run the universe. Afterwards, they turn and thank you for the amazing music you make; to express gratitude, too, they offer you an answer to any one question. What do you ask them?
I have a developing relationship with the eternal now and the unknown, and I’m continuing to cultivate it. I’m glad they had their experience. No questions.
Featured image photo credit: Charlie Weinman