Just What I Feel, my second solo release of 2022, is now available via Strategy of Tension / Bandcamp.

My first release of 2022 was Recurring Dream, a sprawling, heavily arranged songwriting album that drew from my experience as a composer, as well as my work with groups including Modern Nature and Sunwatchers.  Shortly after finishing work on that record, I felt I needed to make something fun, working quickly and easily: the opposite of Recurring Dream’s highly detailed and considered creative process.  So I recorded a series of improvisations for sopranino saxophone, the miniature instrument most commonly associated with La Monte Young, Roscoe Mitchell, and Ravel’s Boléro.  The playing consisted of attempts at a number of extended techniques (some successful, some not) as well as some patterns that were happened upon haphazardly, briefly explored, and then abandoned.  I edited them into a new sequence of twenty tracks, thirty minutes total, and called it a day.

While trying to decide what to do with the recording, I considered the aesthetic baggage of the solo free improvisation album.   The idea of trying to paint with the same brush as Eric Dolphy (the godfather of solo free improv music) seemed impossible.  A lot of contemporary musicians think about the solo free improv album the same way Jake LaMotta approached the boxing ring in Raging Bull, and that didn’t seem like something I was interested in either.  I love trying to create different and unusual timbres, but I didn’t want to just cycle through a bunch of standard tropes with bloodless self-seriousness.  When stripped of its “grant applicant” intellectualization, we’re talking about a practice that will often yield sounds that border on the ridiculous.  But when I was creating these buzzing textures and harsh bursts, they did legitimately feel like an expression of something I couldn’t put into words.

Every day there are dozens of moments that have to be ignored (or absorbed) in order to maintain one’s composure.  Living in a city, you have to witness the pain of other peoples’ total poverty.  If you want a coffee, you have to be served by someone whose labor is being exploited.  Small talk can create spikes of anxiety or discomfort that feel absurd: why should it feel so hard to just have a “normal conversation”? I realized while listening back to my improvisations that these pieces are like the blasts of emotional static needed to erase the painful feelings of everyday life.  That’s my read on it, anyway.

If “solo saxophone rendering the sound of nihilistic mindlessness into music” doesn’t sound like a good time to you, I think that’s understandable.  Seeking to subvert the macho abstract expressionist bravado of the typical solo free improv music release, I decided to lean into the impossible idea of “taking a look inside the mind of the artist.” My friend and bandmate Peter Kerlin turned a series of close-up photos of my head into the rectanguloid photoshop grotesquery that is the outer sleeve.  When the listener pulls off the sleeve, the same visage is revealed—only smeared, as if the act of removing the sleeve caused the defect.  The cassette itself is, naturally, brain-colored.  The packaging comes with a sticker of the tape’s title that is meant to be layered on the j-card, but people can do whatever they want with it.

The tape’s title is a nod to a song by a band that I sort of like and sort of hate but, like everyone else, can’t seem to escape.  The liner notes include a list of significant instrumentalists (heroes and peers) who have inspired me to express myself, to strive for ever-better technique but accept my present state, and to be brave with sharing my feelings even if they’re arguably unpleasant.  I wanted to make something that was fun and I think I did.