You Are Watching

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.