Dear friends,

It's hot! Anyway, I wanted to inform you of a few fun upcoming shows I'm involved with. I'll keep this newsletter short :)

• Friday, September 8, 7pm at Troy Listening Room (aka my home)- I will be playing music from Still, opening from Christopher Tignor who is on his album tour throughout the Northeast!

• Saturday, September 16, 12pm at Sharon Springs' Harvest Fest- my band, Turnover Mule, returns to Sharon Springs for our annual appearance at Harvest Fun. This is fun one with food trucks, craft vendors, and music all day!

• Saturday, October 7, 7pm at Troy Listening Room- local legend Zan Strumfeld and her band Zan & The Winter Folk play at our house, alongside touring singer/songwriter Matthew Fowler. An evening of songs not to be missed!

• Saturday, October 14, 6pm at Troy Music Hall- Kaleidescape- this is a big one that Sophia and I along with the folks at the Troy Music Hall have been planning for about 18 months. It will feature seven acts and over 15 local musicians playing music written specifically for the occasion. More on this later, but tickets are available now.

Until soon-

Upcoming solo shows!

Dear friends,

I am very excited to be sharing news of a few upcoming performances of my solo music (from Still)! I haven't performed this music publicly since December of 2019, and it's changed and evolved a lot since then.

Saturday August 12 3-7pm
@ The Yard, Beacon NY
Performing with Martin Fowler, Jae Soto, Bronze Vases, & LOCATOR
This will be a lovely afternoon of ambient music outside :)
Tickets (by donation, $15-30 suggested) at the door

Dear friends,

Six months ago, I released "Still," my debut full-length album (check it out here if you haven't already). And today, I have a new song out called 29! In contrast to the music on Still, 29 was created entirely from overdubs - layering audio tracks on each other one by one, as opposed to the live & real-time recording of Still. I played many layers of saxophone (my new-to-me, beautiful Selmer Super Action 80), guitar (Zan lent me her gorgeous Martin), upright bass (thanks for the bass Evan!), as well as piano and other samples to add texture (hammered dulcimer is one of them).

Listen to 29 here

The song started as a midi-processing experiment (thrilling, I know) inspired by some short pieces by my friend Patrick Burke. I was taken with the melodies that my experiment generated and started layering up the sounds, and now we're here. Even though I wrote, performed all the parts, and engineered this track on my own, it's fun to see how my musical community is so deeply ingrained in its creation. And probably most of all, I have to thank my wife and partner in music, Sophia, for all her encouragement and support throughout the creation of this song. After spending years making "Still," "29" is the beginning of a new form of music-making for me and those departures from our long-established ways of working can be tumultuous. So with all of that said, take a listen to "29" and let me know what you think! I hope you enjoy it.

"Still" is out now!

Today's the day! My debut full length album "Still" is out now. You can listen and buy it on Bandcamp (the best way to support musicians), or stream it on all the usual suspects. I talked to Sarah LaDuke about it on WAMC's Roundtable, you can listen to that interview here.

Thanks everyone, for your lasting support of my projects. I hope you enjoy "Still," and let me know what you think! Stay tuned for future newsletters- I plan on writing slightly longer letters with my thoughts about various music and audio-related topics.

Happy New Year friends!

If you're looking for some music to help you start 2023 in an introspective way, you can listen to two singles from my upcoming album, Still, here. In case you missed my last letter, my hour-long debut album is coming out on January 20! I recorded it live at the Troy Music Hall in 2020, and mixed and mastered it over the course of two years. It's meditative, expansive, and maybe is just what you've been looking for.

This is a screenshot of the Max "patch" I created and used to perform and record this album. This image represents a culmination of 5 years of learning, experimentation, tweaking, and performing of this music. All of that plus years of practicing my saxophone, improvising, and listening is present in the music on the album. I hope you take a listen, and consider buying it if you like it (buying the digital album on Bandcamp is the equivalent of about 3,000 streams on Spotify in terms of what I get paid, so it means a lot).

Album Announcement!!

Dear friends,

I am extremely excited to announce my first full-length album, "Still," which will be released on January 20 (which also happens to be my birthday)! It's an ambient, meditative album of improvised saxophone and live electronics music, and the culmination of approximately 7 years of musical exploration and development. It started with a desire to be able to improvise using my saxophone but create sounds much larger than I could make as a single person playing one instrument. I was also in need of a more meditative, slower-paced musical outlet than I had in my fast-paced jazz environment at the time. To accomplish those creative/spiritual goals, I created my own software (which I treated as an extension of my instrument) that I could interact with live to multiply the sound of my saxophone, creating layers, textures, and harmonies that were otherwise impossible in real time. The randomness built into the program means I am never quite sure of what sound it will create next, allowing me to improvise alongside the software instrument. Over time, as I refined my approach to this form of music making, my musical focus also shifted away from jazz to the more stylistically agnostic/ambient sound of this album. This album was recorded at the acoustic gem of the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall while concerts were suspended in the summer of 2020. Everything was performed live: there are no overdubs and no added reverb anywhere on the album. The album cover (below) is from a roll of film from 2003 I recently discovered in my childhood bedroom. This is a photo of my first saxophone, which I got in mid-October of that year. It was one of the few frames from that roll of film that had any intelligible image remaining.

Hello friends!

There have been many things released recently with my name on them, and I wanted to share (/remind you of) some of them. Tomorrow is Bandcamp Friday, when the platform Bandcamp gives 100% of sales to the musicians (it's typically around 85%, which is still a significant improvement over the $0.003/stream from popular streaming services). Anyway, before I go ranting about that, here's some music!

• Sophia Vastek's In Our Softening (recorded, mixed, mastered, and co-produced by me at our home in Troy, NY)

• Georgia Beatty's Apprentice to Transformation (also recorded, mixed, mastered, and co-produced by me in Troy)

• Derrick Michaels' Solo Saxophone Vol. 1 Live at An Die Musik, which releases tomorrow! I had the pleasure of mastering this beautiful record

• Speaking of saxophone, I played saxophone on the song "Little Lightning" on the indie rock album Price Chopper Radio by Brent Gorton

• And speaking of me playing saxophone, a full-length album of my own music will arrive in early 2023! More info on that soon...

Troy Listening Room

Hello friends,

As the temperature finally dips below 70, we're harvesting the onions from our garden, the squirrels are stealing all the peaches from our peach tree, and I am writing with news of some releases that I hinted at in my last appearance in your inbox:

Fall music:

• October 21 will see two (!) releases that I recorded, mixed, and mastered be unleashed the world. I am immensely proud of both of these projects, which were recorded at my home in Troy, NY.

  • Sophia Subbayya Vastek's album In Our Softening. The first single comes out this Friday, September 9! Pre-order the album here. Join Sophia's newsletter to learn more about the album.

  • Georgia Beatty's album Apprentice to Transformation. Take a read through the attached PDF to learn more about the album (and for a very nice insight from Georgia into my approach to audio engineering).

• November 4 will see the release of Derrick Michaels' solo saxophone album, which I mastered. It was recorded live in Baltimore, and mixed by Derrick.

Hello friends!

I'm dropping into your inbox with a couple quick updates!

First two shows:

• Next Wednesday (August 24) I will be in NYC with Yarn/Wire at Time:Spans! We will perform Tonband, by Enno Poppe and Wolfgang Heiniger, which we recorded in 2017 at EMPAC in Troy, NY (that recording residency is part of the reason I now live in Troy). That recording was released on German label Wergo last year, and is available here. Tonband is a rare, truly wild piece of music that I am very excited to get to be part of once again. The stage set up is quite large, so seating will be more limited than usual. Grab a ticket before they're all gone!

• September 17 in Sharon Springs, NY, my band Turnover Mule performs at the Harvest Festival, playing mostly originals and some covers. Should be a great day!

Hello friends!

It's been a busy spring for me so far, as it has been for many of us. I traveled to Vancouver for the first time, and enjoyed a very early morning walk by the bay there (courtesy of the different time zone, and pictured above). The clouds and mountains and water are punctuated by a single file line of cargo ships entering the harbor north of the city. The rest of the day was spent in a lovely venue in downtown Vancouver with Talea Ensemble performing works with (and without) electronics.

Now I'm back in Troy, and have some exciting releases to tell you about: