Viridescence #1

Ambient music in the key of green

In honor of the Lunar New Year (and my own personal new year) I offer you Viridescence #1, a soundcape based around the sonic frequency 587 Hz which corresponds to a deep green hue. It is designed to bring about the psychological state one might have walking through a forest, staring at sunlight through the veins of leaves, or gazing into the flame of a green candle. Please enjoy letting it permeate your day as it loops gently behind you, crafting a soft verdant soundscape imbued with fire.

It’s pouring rain as it often does on my birthday. As a kid, I used to have pool parties in June after school was out and so the other kids reasonably assumed that’s when my birthday was but they were mistaken. My birthday falls shortly after Valentines Day when the weather in LA is temperamental at best and often torrential which meant that parties were often stuffy affairs indoors with nowhere to escape. I hated being the center of attention and would rather float around and gaze at the light reflecting off my hair in the pool and so I became an accidental mystery Aquarius.

My birthday frequently fell on the day that the rains would cause chaos in my fair city. Often, school would be canceled due to flooding or it would be a three day weekend because of President’s Day and so I would spend the day watching the rain, reading books, gazing at the trees growing greener by the moment. I liked the drama of the drops forming oil stained puddles on my street and relished in the chance to move at my own pace instead of being shuffled from class to class.

The older I got, the more I found myself playing music on rainy days, as it gave me the perfect excuse to mess about on the piano or practice singing to Bjork as a quintessential teenager of the 90’s. I would hide in the attic of my college house with my keyboard and laptop, capturing the sounds that echoed in my mind on an early version of Garageband, yet again skipping parties where I might be trapped in a stuffy room with too many people.

Now as I complete another solar rotation, I find myself again in my studio, on my laptop in my art parlor, crafting melodies and missives to the world as a beacon from my self crafted solitude.My mind flits and flips through so many ideas that I sometimes don’t know what to do with myself and this year is no different. It’s the year of the Fire Horse which sounds auspicious and dangerous, a time of action but also caution, because conjuring a flaming beast is quite audacious.

Letting people see unpolished sides of me takes more courage than I thought but I can’t deny this feeling of forward messy momentum. It felt right to let you all in on my world of sound experiments, of hums and whirs that create loops that soothe me and inspire me, the textures that find their way into my compositions and journals. I trust that you can hold that I am a songwriter of more than one style and that you can pick what feels right for you, the light meditations or the dark piano songs or the glitchy electronic elegies and beyond. Maybe you will like them all and wouldn’t that be wonderful?