Let Up

2020

Single

Available on digital.

Get it on Bandcamp.

There’s an early 90s pop/hip-hop vibe going on here that I can’t quite place.  Did I just hear PM Dawn when I was 12 and make up a bunch of music in my imagination that sounded the same?

I allowed myself to get really wordy on this song and the vocals are pretty upfront.  Surprisingly it started with a long-attack synth riff.

The lyrics exist in a universe where we have unseen stewards of our reality, and where something like the climate crisis is sort of a runtime error in their management software.  The narrator is a projection of their abstractions, going through daily life just as we do, but describing it all as if translated into a top-level language and back again.

For the video, I ran with this concept, which to be honest was very fuzzy at the time.  But that’s my favorite place to be.  Throughout the video, there are highly technical and sort of nonsensical strings of text accompanied by fractal graphs and environmental stats.  I used a fractal generator app to make the animations.  It was a really fun video to make and my favorite to rewatch.  Another fun trick I did was shooting footage of snow on a sunny day so that the bright spots look like clouds and the shadows are sky blue.  The bare trees are keyed out so the world of spring trees looks both familiar and otherworldly.

The B side is a song I wrote somewhere between 2015 and 2019 where all I did really was play piano.  I didn’t record a lot.  I was using borrowed pianos and hadn’t yet found a way to get songs like that down as a track.  This one barely works I think because it’s so spare and open.  Rhythm is implied and the synth is there to suture it together where it might otherwise open up too much.