Introducing new musical project: Saint Silva
Hey friends,
You haven't received an email from me in a very long time, as promised. But I'm back for the moment! And I wanted to share a new project that I just announced (along with a few sporadic updates at the end).
Saint Silva
Today I released my first EP under the name Saint Silva. It's called Tiny. Saint Silva is a new project that thought up a few months ago, and I'm excited to open it up to the world. In addition to the EP, I published a short essay on why I started this project and the musical references/inspiration that spawned it. But here's an abridged version:
Silva ("forest" in Latin, if curious) is a new thing, and an intentional departure from how I typically write and record music. Although I have been writing music most of my life, I only recently began to actively put out new music again under B. Dexter. This music is often deeply personal, lyrical, and structured in a more-or-less mainstream friendly format. But lately I have become enveloped in the worlds of experimental and ambient music, which don't seem to fit as well into the process of how I usually write songs. Saint Silva is my way of granting permission, to myself, to experiment freely with the ideas I am currently most enamored by.
The music sits somewhere between a "release" and an "experiment". A bit of both, really. This album was composed during a weekend away at a tiny house in New Hampshire. The tracks include various field recordings from inside and outside of the house. Most tracks use only one or two analog synthesizers, and a piano. Each song captures a place in time, removed from the world, temporarily. I hope they can bring you even a whisper of the peace they have given me.
Some other things I've been up to
I have been working behind the scenes to "pull my selves together", which is an odd way of saying that I'd like to better incorporate my various interests and pursuits into one space. Most of the time my life feels segmented: I have my work stuff, my coding stuff, some music stuff, some writing. But I always have had this intuition they shouldn't mix or mingle. Only one channel/outlet per interest.
Then I read this book by Jenny Odell and decided this was a bad intuition, one that I likely absorbed through the coded messages of social media and advertising. Afterwards, I wrote an essay about it and resolved to not pre-sort myself into neat boxes anymore. As Whitman wrote: "I am large. I contain multitudes."
Here's what else I've been up to:
added a digital garden to my website where I will be posting ideas, sketches, demos, thoughts, etc.
coded up a bookshelf to display everything I have ever (remembered) reading and to track these books, because books are power
re-started a newsletter I have been writing for a few years called Data Curious.
Hope you enjoy the new music,
b.