My covers album, Enduring the Veil is out on streaming services as of 9/4. This album has tracks that I started working on over 5 years ago and is the closest I have come to creating the music that I dreamed of producing when I started. You can listen to the album on streaming services today:
The title comes from a play on words, a veil is a covering, the album is a covers album. The album title has a much deeper meaning to me though. The album is about how difficult music production is to do: this album has years of work that have gone into it, I had to endure all of the time and challenges that it took over those years to release the album. This album is a symbol of the baggage I have been dragging around with me in my music journey.
The cover art encodes the title in a puzzle. I love puzzles and puzzle boxes. In my songs and writing, I intentionally create layers of meaning that have surface and deeper meaning and I also subconsciously embed my feelings and secondary intentions. Can you figure out all the clues and answers?
Through the time that it took me to release this album, I had friends enter and leave my life. I had teachers come and go and come back. I saw many of my inspirations exit stage left and quit music. I had people I love and whom I supported stab me in the back and never return the support I gave them. I made new friendships and burned a few bridges myself. During the production of this album I moved around the country to 5 different states and cohabitated with a half-dozen people under whom I honed my craft, learned from, and shared what I learned.
The veil is also a metaphor for the reality that we create in our minds through our senses and experience. The veil is a false reality that we put over our own eyes to make sense of the world around us. Spiritual journeys lift the veil and show us reality for what it really is but that reality can be terrifying or disturbing when we uncover the veil and face it. This album also explores some dimensions of the veil lifting that I have experienced during the process of creating the music on this album. Through my own journey with music, I have endured the harsh but spirit-growing adventure of passing back and forth through the veil that helps me cope and interact with reality – this album shares parts of that experience.
Tracks
I synthesized all of the canvas art using ComfyUI and diffusion models that I tailored and fine-tuned myself. The track selections have deeper meanings than I would like to cover here but some surface level observations that I’ll share now along with the synthesized canvas art that I published for Spotify:
Gooey (cover) – This is a track about healing. I found this song to be helpful as I re-engaged with my friends who had facilitated my betrayal and didn’t help me when I needed their support.
Everything in the right place (cover) – This is a song that I created as an upbeat cover of the Radiohead song from the Kid A album. Radiohead has forever been one of the most transformative influences musically to me and Kid A always has had a special place in my mind for its electronic cross-over from rock to electronica. Every single album that Radiohead put out contradicted the previous work from Radiohead and my music follows in the footsteps of these pioneers: I don’t produce in a genre and I just make what I feel like.
Heartbeats (cover) – This is a cover of a song by The Knife, which I discovered a very long time ago when I was DJing. Someone at my gig came up and literally handed me a burned CD which I played out and kept. This is another song that I found helpful in processing the times that I was cheated on by my friends and partners during the creation of this album.
Chameleon (cover) – This is a Herbie Hancock cover that I produced to be played out alongside the other Herbie Hancock covers that were from Crawdad Sniper for a festival set I played in 2023. The Jazz Fusion standards of Herbie Hancock have influenced my taste in music and style of bass music I follow.
Cinema (cover) – This downtempo is a cover of a remix of Benny Benassi and Gary Go’s classic EDM track. I originally produced this track as part of a downtempo mixtape of edits of classics and decided later to record my own vocals and turn it into a cover.
Steve Jobs (cover) – This track is a cover of a Steve Aoki track. The original Aoki track features a section with sound design that at the time was a popular sound – to me it sounded like mosquitos – so I adopted the parts of the song that I liked to just have that in a song. The Steve Jobs riff from Steve Aoki is the default song that I play when I noodle around on synths and I have played this riff on hundreds of keyboards.