The Edge of the High Trace is my first foray into trying to put together a fully realized instrumental album that is not associated with an external project, i.e. a theater production, film, or other similar medium. I wanted to make something that stood on it's own as a pleasant but hopefully meaningful and deep listen.

I started recording the album in Aug. 2020, and while it was never meant to be a "pandemic album" it was initiated and finalized in the midst of this crisis, and I'm sure the relative personal and creative isolation was a factor in its construction and feeling.

On a technical level, the album, or at least its first textures came to me internally and I could hear what I wanted long before recording (which was new for me, as usually my relationship to an instrument is what calls forth a particular sound or type of music). And, since I began this shortly after I put the final piece of drywall up on my new recording studio I was in a technical mindset, imagining different mic setups and so on, and that really helped me get the sonic textures out of my head and into the world.

So, the first piece and all the pieces after sprang out of a relationship to the technology I was using to create it, a studio - not a singular instrument but rather a collection of instruments and a computer and a quiet space to record.

That expansion of thinking on my part, I believe helped to create the more expansive feeling of the album. I found myself thinking more about sonic texture and environments and not as much about individual musical parts or ideas.

In large part, all of the material on this album is improvised, which allowed me to overcome my very real musical limitations and capture musical moments I would never have been able to if I consciously intended them, and after those impulses were collected, it was just the usual game of seeing what worked in the context of any given piece or the album as a whole. One fun thing is that because the album is so textural rather than thematic so much of the sound is buried beneath the mix, simply felt and not heard as engineering lingo might describe it.

This improvisatory spirit carried through to the two collaborations present on the album. Violinist Heather Sommerlad joined in on the first track, recording her parts without being allowed to hear the music until the moment the record button was hit. Guitarist Tommy White followed suit on the last track, recording blind. The result is a kind of non-linear madness that was later collaged back into the pieces in a (hopefully!) comprehensible way.

Emotionally and thematically, I think this album was my way of honoring my father, who passed unexpectedly in 2016. The single most devastating experience of my life, it took me four years before I could even approach the idea of the dealing with that loss and my love for him in sound.

So I think the album is part memoriam and part a note of love to my father's spirit, letting him know I still hear him and love him and hope he can see the hard work I've put into making this life work in a way that he'd be proud of. It's also a sort of "where is he now" question, if he's out there somewhere, what's he doing, what's he up to? In the end, the music was part me imagining him in new situations and being reborn into new scenarios. The most specific piece in memoriam would be the song "Eighty-four Today", recorded in a burst of overwhelming emotion on his birthday in complete and unaltered takes with almost no mixing - an intentional choice and my attempt to just let it be a polaroid of that moment at the keyboard, a moment I won't forget and want to remember as is.

Finally, a note on the album's title. I honestly don't know what it means, but it came to me in a dream and so I went with it. In the dream I entered an old elaborate theater and passed through a turnstile. There were many people waiting to see a production of some sort, and my father emerged from the crowd and gave me three tickets to the show. On the ticket was the show title, which read The Edge of the High Trace. I knew the first ticket was for him, the second for me, and I felt the third might be for my newly born daughter.