HUNDREDYEARCOMET

HUNDREDYEARCOMET is my music production side project. It encompasses sound, graphic design, original artwork, and collaboration with other multidisciplinary artists to create fully realized multimedia projects.

Creating the album was definitely a trial-by-fire experience. Learning music production, mixing, mastering, composition, among other things was an amazing, rewarding challenge on which to cut my teeth, and the lessons learned over the year it took to finish the project have come to define me as a musician.

In a few words, You Are Watching is a glimpse into the world of transmissions, vast and open, soaked in analog warmth. A deep, calming breath of TV static. Inspiration was taken from experimental music, vaporwave and synthwave, YouTube analog horror, and the overwhelming sense of nostalgia felt as a child of local New Jersey television in the mid-2000's.

The music was a meandering, exploratory, and organic process, taking weeks and sometimes months to form a seed that would grow into a proper track. The visual language, though, was firmly realized from the start. Black and white. Fuzzy and glowing. Abstract and vast. The cube, sphere, cone, torus, and cylinder were essential guiding visual elements that formed after recording This Is in January 2022 (it was called Please Hold then). They came to influence and drive excursions into early computer-generated imagery showcases from Berkeley and oddball animated interstitials from local television stations in the 80's and 90's. The first few notes of the album beckon these five shapes, each representing a letter in the acronym HYCTV, the station from which the record, in its internal narrative, is being broadcast.

But it would be inaccurate to say that the record had always taken the same shape throughout its production. It was originally called Vapors and bore a telephone holdline angle to its narrative, but it wasn't meant to last as new inspiration appeared almost every single day. The record was a moving target, twisting and morphing as fresh ideas wove their way into the tapestry of my art sense. Some roads led to dead ends, yet it would've been a travesty to not have brought something back from those paths. No idea, I feel, was ever wasted.

Pluto is an evergreen project comprised of sonic and stylistic experiments, inspired by the Modern Sounds synthesizer of the same name. Original sun artwork courtesy of Vescien →.

The Eurorack modular format lends itself heavily to discovery and experimentation. There is very little facility for composition, and once a patch is created, it can only ever exist as long as the cables, knobs, and sliders stay put; to make something new, the old needs to be destroyed.

For myself, it's important not only to capture these ephemeral sketches, but also to perform them, to converse with the instrument and all its generative behaviors. Then with a camera setup and a video format, I created SESSION.

Once I'd wrapped up a few recordings, the project had organically taken on a visual language inspired by the digital era of the late 1990s and early 2000s. SESSION became both an exercise in music performance as well as in art and design direction, one informing the other in a very natural way.

Since the first performance entitled "JULY 2024", SESSION has grown to six entries and continues to grow on a semi-monthly basis.