I've released a new album! It's called Literature for Llamas. It's music, not literature, and it has basically nothing to do with llamas---I'm following the Holy Roman Empire approach to product naming. The music was created over the past eight-ish months in California and Ohio.

Aquamarine is a very ambient, calming piece, with some percussion to shake things up a bit.

Coast Redwoods was inspired by the experience of being out in a redwood forest---that sense of the immensity and mystery of nature.

Fields was an experiment in heavily processing theremin recordings to produce a richer and more solid sound. I've been trying to teach myself the theremin and use it in my music ever since a theremin showed up in the mail with no explanation of who had sent it to me or why I'd gotten it. (Turns out it was a birthday present from my brother, which arrived much faster than he had expected, so he didn't get a chance to tell me it was coming before it arrived.)

Grain Elevator and Farmland in Winter were inspired by a visit to central Ohio---they're based on those sunny but cold days when the rural landscape is covered with snow.

Shasta was inspired by the area around Castle Crags State Park in northern California. One of the synthesizers in the piece produces waveforms based on the profile of Mount Shasta, hence the name.

After writing Windmills, I decided it sounded like the concept of sitting in a field watching a bunch of windmills turning. That's how I come up with a lot of my song titles---I don't generally have a plan for what to call them until after they're finished. (Though this album has some outliers in that regard---for instance, Coast Redwoods was intended to be called that from the very beginning.)

Tea Tree is a robust, minimalist piece with some improvised percussion (the lid of a cooking pot, heard very subtly in the background.)

And I decided that Wind and Sun sounded kind of like the feeling of a summer day in central California.

Lights Through Fog, like Coast Redwoods, was influenced by the existential experience of being out in a redwood forest. It was also influenced by seeing a brightly-lit city in the fog, at night, out the window of an airliner.