My Father's House Has Just the One Room But It's Kind of a Big One

Recently I saw someone else's artist/band description which was clearly very serious, written in the same overblown self-important style as the blurbs I'd been writing for previous albums here, so I decided that it made no sense for me to continue the joke since Poe's Law made it indistinguishable from people who were actually as pretentious as I was pretending to be.

So this is an album I made out of the latest four songs that I recorded. I love listening to each of them, since I made them for myself. They're pretty different.

"Hello How Are You" is a happy melody that grew out of something I was playing one morning recently. The main instrument is a microguitar and there's also a nice bit of violin solo on it. It also includes vinyl record noise from Joe DeShon. Listening to this song may make you a bit happier than you were before.

"Qu'est-ce que j'ai fait pour mériter ça" ("What did I do to deserve this?") is slow and meditative, with repeating and mutating melodies on violin, oboe, cello, and koto. For months this was the song that my ~2.5 year old daughter requested that I put on for her to go to sleep to. She calls it "the princess song." There are no lyrics; she just likes princesses.

"Septem Piercing" is written in the mildly nerdy 7/4 tempo, because I'd never done that before. The main melody is mostly carried by the piano, but it gets handed off and changed a bit over time too. There's some violin in there and an oboe and some synthesizers, but mostly it's about seeing if I could find a 7/4 groove that I could be in love with.

"Goodbye" is what happened when I tried to take off all the guardrails on tempo and structure. There's a persistent and almost entirely consistent drone, overlaid at various moments by shakuhachi, throatsinging, organ, harp, dog barking from jppi_Stu, and one brief Dead Can Dance quotation that seemed like it really wanted to be there. I play an ebony 1.8 shakuhachi that I made with the assistance and oversight of David Brown, and a 2.4 that he made from red gum.