002: December 2024
Endless jetlag, Abbey Road, year-end non-lists, columnated ruins domino...
Season’s greetings, friends and lovers. After two whirlwind weeks across London, Paris, and NYC, I’m finally settled at my parents’ place in the Carolina low country until the new year. It’s a welcome reprieve from the constant flux of planes, trains, and taxis—not to mention recent weeks leading up tethered to the driver’s wheel. The quiet feels disarming, as does the traveler’s insomnia that’s kept me company; an inevitably of time zones colliding, jetlag compounding, and the slow realization that my life is settling into its new drag as a Californian.
I’ve been crushing a re-read of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I first got lost in it during a Ridgewood snowstorm, pedaling furiously on an exercise bike at the height of Omicron in a futile attempt to fend off cabin fever. Like Hans Castorp on his convalescent alpine retreat, I’ve been grappling with time itself: its expanses, compressions, and the peculiar distortions that accompany a year in perpetual motion.
Indeed, this year has been one of movement—geographic, emotional, and creative. My one last night in Paris was spent Christmas shopping to the sounds of Bill Evans at the Vanguard, savoring confit de canard at my favorite entrecôte in the Marais, and quietly saying goodbye to a city that shaped so much of my year. Pas au revoir mais à plus tard—not goodbye but see you later—a farewell so understated it caught me off guard.
Last week, I had the surreal privilege of tracking new work at Abbey Road. On the first day, the assistant engineer—formerly an apprentice to Flood on the last few PJ Harvey albums—gave us a guided tour. Photography wasn’t allowed in the canteen or common areas, a rule that felt fittingly strict for a place so steeped in mythology. When we entered Studio 2—the Beatles’ sacred ground—he mentioned the staff Christmas party held there the night before. As he spoke, I caught the room’s unmistakable reverb: the ghost of “She Loves You” reverberating in the same space where it was born. It’s a sound I’ve carried since I was seven years old, one I never thought I’d encounter so intimately.
We camped out for the week in Studio 3—the birthplace of the modern recording studio, not to mention Dark Side of the Moon, The Bends, Blonde, and over 40 Beatles tracks. The backline we had access to felt like it belonged behind glass in a museum: the original celesta from the Harry Potter soundtracks and one of the upright pianos used for the final chord of “A Day in the Life,” cigarette burn from Ringo still intact. It was a week of improvised music, endless curry, and countless conversations about creative practice with an extraordinary wrecking crew: Lia Kohl, Lesley Mok, Anthony Cazade, and Jordan Reyes at the helm. Occupying a space that aligned with my purpose for the first time since I chose to uproot, the energy in the room often felt electric, like a conversation with an unwoven past. As far as “kid in candy store” moments go, this wasn’t just about achieving a career milestone—it was about feeling the weight of everything that came before while staying fully present in the moment. A wild and fitting way to close out a chaotic year.
And then came New York, where I reluctantly played the part of visitor instead of local for the first time. I ended my whirlwind travels at a best friend’s beloved annual holiday party, surrounded by my nearest and dearest and a bottle of Brennevín, its caraway-spiced warmth cutting through December chill. The night crescendoed in a perfect moment: all of us singing along to the Beach Boys’ Surf’s Up spinning on the turntable.
Nursing a nasty hangover at JFK the next day, it was hard not to think of Brian Wilson’s falsettoed coyote call: columnated ruins domino. It’s an image of collapse—structures thought unshakable crumbling under their own weight. In the context of our fractured world, it feels almost prophetic. Oligarchic control tightening, corporate power entrenching, the alienation of individuals growing. Closer still are the atrocities we scroll past: the genocides, the systemic erasures. The ruins pile up, one domino at a time. And yet, in that room with friends, voices raised in defiance, it didn’t feel hopeless. It felt like a moment of resistance, of finding something unbreakable amid the collapse.
Somewhere between takes in London and the round-robin reminder that the child is the father of the man, I’ve come to understand this year’s chaos as a kind of falling, a cascade of boundaries breaking apart: connection, creativity, and self. Not everything broken is meant to be fixed. Not every silence demands filling. Moving forward often means leaving things behind, not rebuilt, not restored, but held in a quiet kind of understanding.
I’ve carried the shadow of one relationship in particular this year, a candle that burned way too brightly to last, its presence a constant even when I tried to set it down. It felt like a ruin we built together, slowly crumbling under the weight of its own architecture. The sharp edges of those moments dulled with time, but the lessons stayed, as much in the falling apart as in what still stood. There’s a clarity that comes with ruins. They strip away pretenses and make it impossible to avoid the shape of what once was. The echoes of those moments ripple forward, especially in how I collaborate, how I create, and how I trust.
I’ve learned that it’s not about trying to rebuild what’s fractured or smoothing over imperfections. It’s about sitting with the mess, letting the cracks reveal something deeper, and finding a way to move within that space of imperfection. The falling, the collapsing, is never just destruction. It’s also a kind of truth. It’s the foundation for what comes next, even when it’s hard to see it at first. In those moments, I think about the times we shared—the quiet conversations, the shared music, the moments of connection that still hum in the background. Even as the structure fell, those pieces didn’t disappear. They just changed shape, reframed themselves as lessons I carry forward. Collaboration, I’ve learned, isn’t about smoothing over fractures; it’s about trusting the imperfect, leaning into the cracks where light still finds a way to get in.
Maybe that’s what “Surf’s Up” is about: standing together against the tidal waves of collapse, if only for three fleeting minutes.
Housekeeping: This month’s newsletter will experiment with a slightly different format—the mix will be paywalled, while the remaining writings will remain open and accessible. This project has always been a work in progress, evolving as I figure out the best way to balance sharing with sustainability. For $5/month, you’ll gain access to the mix and future exclusive content. Please chip in if you’re feeling generous this holiday season. You’re helping me more than the stories I share would have you believe. Thank you for being here and supporting this experiment in its early days.
In 2024, I had the privilege of working on several records that finally saw daylight and made their way into the world:
I mixed Viewfinder, a free jazz song cycle by my bestie Wendy Eisenberg, inspired by their seismic shift in perception after corrective eye surgery. It was tracked to tape with a sextet at Figure 8 in Brooklyn and digitally dialed to strike a balance between the vintage dryness of a Drag City production and the dreamy alpine haze of an ECM double-album.
The other half of Brooklyn’s most beloved experimental music power couple, my other bestie More Eaze, released Lacuna + Parlor, a record I contributed Hammond organ and electronics to that redefines ambient Americana while subtly challenging its conventions. For as long as we’ve been collaborating, Mari’s work has always felt tactile and breathing, but this one in stretches time-space in a way that’s truly irresistible.
In February, I spent a month recording at La Frette, a 19th-century manor an hour north of Paris equipped with a Neve console, a Fairlight sampler, and enough classic rock backline to make any gearhead swoon. That session birthed two albums spearheaded by my brother-in-sound, American Dreams bossman Jordan Reyes. The first is the untitled debut of his Ark Of Teeth project, a high-literary, industrial-tinged songwriter record on which I play more instruments than I care to list here.
The second—BLACKOUT by DJBLACKMETA—is a multimedia spoken-word collaboration with travis from ONO, a queer elder I deeply admire. I contributed bass, organ, and electronics to its evocative sonic bedding, and spent hours in the kitchen of the studio talking with travis about their life, their art, and everything in between. The project “interrogates Southern culture, history, transhumanism, jazz, hip hop, and more through word, sound, and visuals.”
Also at La Frette, I recorded an hour’s worth improvisational piano-and-electronics duo with my kid sister Lucy Liyou, and a solo cover of the only single released by Woody Guthrie’s daughter. Excerpts from both ended up on a charity compilation for the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund this spring, compiled by my friends Cody Defalco and Evan Welsh.
Finally, I released Hindsight, the first in a series of “producer’s songwriter” albums under my own name. Also released by American Dreams and featuring performances from many chosen family members, it’s a slab of autobiography that wrestles with themes of neurodivergence, non-monogamy, music industry grift, and other matters I like to yell about. It’s honest and messy and feels the closest thing to myself in record form so far. Despite a subtle fanfare, I am profoundly proud of how it turned out and wait with bated breath for newfound listeners to catch on.
It finally happened: I’ve entered a phase of life where the urge to hierarchize other people’s art has escaped me. Maybe it’s the result of my personal upheavals—or perhaps the frustration of watching so many so-called films of the year lose steam in their denouements. Regardless, my ears haven’t stopped paying undivided attention. In fact, there’s a common thread I’ve noticed in the records I loved this year: they feel like conversations with their own histories, for once unconcerned with originality or heralding a new era.
Familiar frameworks are being dismantled and reimagined with modern tools: programming and lyricism work seamlessly together; the distinction between live performance and studio manipulation has all but disappeared; voices oscillate between deliberate affectation and unfiltered vulnerability. These records seem to embody a negotiation—sometimes seamless, sometimes tense—between inheritance and invention. How deliberate this is, I can’t say. I’m not making any grand declarations about the advent of a “post-songwriter” era, but it’s clear that something is shifting glacially. This isn’t about breaking from tradition or canon; it’s about reshaping it, finding new resonances in old forms, and moving the conversation forward in ways that feel both all-too-personal and yet still maintain a broad-stroke significance.
I heard it in Jessica Pratt’s paisley-patterned brevity, Kim Gordon’s deadpan vacation packing list delivered Robert Ashley-style over boom-bap beats, and the double-wide chorus of mk.gee’s Fender Jaguar. Geordie Greep flexed his fusion chops with signature art-school ambition—results mixed, but effort unmistakable—while LA sideman Daryl Johns managed to rise to the same occasion with a Tascam and a fraction of the production value. This dynamic was just as palpable on records where words failed: Bill Orcutt’s four-string Telecaster sang Technicolor elegies over passages of Perry Como, while Rafael Toral synthesized quadraphonic birdsongs from scratch. Now that they’ve received their hard-earned flowers, Still House Plants remain sounding like they’re inventing music in real time without ever having heard it before.
The 2024 record that has knocked the wind out of my sails, and best illustrates what I’m discussing here, reached me while we were in London, mastering what will be the second Ark Of Teeth record at Metropolis Studios—our engineer played it while we were preparing the bounces. The fact that it was just released earlier this month means that it has evaded the year-end discourse entirely, which is why I am putting it on a pedestal here. I listened to Cameron Winter’s Heavy Metal daily on the walk through Queen’s Park en route to Abbey Road, in a state of shock that this came from the weathered voice and mind of a 22-year-old in Brooklyn. Without giving the game away, the defining quality of this ten-song set is motion: something so subtle and unassuming that it takes you by surprise and eventually moves you to tears. Each song on this thing feels like an album in itself and serves as a reminder of what’s possible in music when an artist approaches creation with equal parts reverence and curiosity. It feels like an act of perpetual discovery, and is proof that the kids are indeed alright. Hear it for yourself and you’ll know what I mean.
