new album: “Under the paving-stones, the beach!” by moon watcher

I didn't know what kind of music I'd make on my trip until I landed in San Francisco. The day started at 4am in New Jersey. It was too early, when I locked my front door and put my headphones in, for anything but ambient music: The sun wasn't up and the Dunkin Donuts weren't open.

The hour called for "GREEN" by Hiroshi Yoshimura. I guess this decision set a tone.

During the pandemic, I spent a lot of time thinking about how I wanted my life to look once there was a vaccination in circulation. One of the bigger commitments I made to myself was piecing together a collection of music gear that would allow me to record while traveling, specifically on airplanes, with nothing but a backpack.

Somewhere over the middle of the country, I pulled a small synth from my backpack and began turning some knobs on sounds. Before I landed, I would have “the sea of memory and forgetfulness” completely arranged. This, again, set a tone and established a few musical ideas I'd continue to explore the rest of my trip as I posted up in guest rooms and idiosyncratic Airbnbs with my synth, an old laptop and a field recorder.

*A look at the travel set-up as pictured at an Airbnb in Pasadena.*

The result is the following album of ambient arrangements, constructed of synth parts, sounds captured between Sebastopol and San Diego, my friend Dan's acoustic guitar, and my friend Ryan's keyboard, which he was kind enough to play on the album.

“along the alley, up the back steps”

It would be impossible to talk about this album without discussing Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel Inherent Vice and, to some degree, the 2014 film adaption. Few pieces of fiction have made such a lasting impression on the way I experience the world. I didn’t set out to make an album honoring this work, but it seems to be, in hindsight, the most likely thing to materialize given the circumstances.

Set in Las Angeles in 1970 — and amidst the closedown of the wide-eyed optimism that defined the counter-culture movements in the wake of the Summer of Love being punctuated by the emphatic exclamation point of the Manson murders — the book examines ephemera, loss and regret in a changing world. It’s also interested in the humanism required to navigate a collection of systems that continually make unsolicited offers to obtain your humanity for a price.

The opening scene of the novel, built around the classic noir tradition of an ex-lover visiting a private eye, explores these themes beautifully — and the title of this song is pulled from the novel’s opening sentence. I’ve opened the album with sounds I’d captured with a field recorder, sitting outside of the location where the story’s protagonist, Doc, resided in the film adaptation: right on the strand of Manhattan beach, a corollary to the novel’s Gordita Beach.

*I couldn’t resist grabbing my own photo of the alley used in the film adaptation.*

Like a lot of the found sounds on this album, this contains a confluence of nature and the modern world around it. Originally unsure of what the application of these found sounds would be, I found the encroachment of motors to be frustrating, something that marred the more traditionally “peaceful” sounds you’d want in an ambient album. But I was also rereading the novel on my trip and the separate processes of making music and revisiting Inherent Vice began to converge. Eventually, I began to think about how this related to the themes of change in the novel, specifically real estate development, and the tension between the natural and commodifiable.

The musical arrangement of this track, which becomes present around 35 seconds, was arranged and recorded during a one-night stop in Morro Bay after a day of driving south down CA-1. It’s based on a more “traditional” chord progression I’d always assumed would become more of a pop song but, during my drive, I was listening to 2009’s Riceboy Sleeps by Jonsi and Alex and was inspired to take that progression and create this arrangement after listening to the strings in “Happiness.”

the prints of her bare feet

As I began looking at the album near the end of the mixing process and thinking more directly about how the book had informed some of my thinking, about both what I was making and in the years between my trip and having first read the novel, I began searching for excerpts that captured a specific mood. Many of the titles on the album are pulled from these excerpts so, even if you don’t read the whole book, you could search its text for these titles and stumble on passages that seemed, at least to me, to relate to this music in one way or another.

This song comes from a scene, later in the novel, in which both characters that appear in the opening are walking on the beach in the rain. Doc notices as Shasta’s feet, the same that came down the alley and up the back steps in the first sentence of the novel, are making prints in the sand that are then quickly washed away by the rain.

Rain, and obviously the beach (so, maybe more broadly, “water”), are both major elements in both the novel and this album. This track was recorded while sitting at the dining room table of my friends’ home in Sebastopol. At its center is an arhythmic arrangement of what sounds to me like a glockenspiel. Along with the OP-1, I had packed its smaller sibling, the OP-Z. Sometimes, I like to use its sequencer as though its a more randomized tape loop to create layers repeating patterns of melody that are technically out of sync. It’s an intentional embellishment of the idea that, if you play a mistake once, it’s a mistake. But, if you repeat it, it becomes part of the music.

The impact of this technique, at least applied in this way, has always reminded me of rain drops hitting the ground. Coupled with the image of Shasta’s forward movement, sometimes through the past, these two tracks felt like a natural pairing to open the record.

the sea of memory and forgetfulness

One of my favorite things about the OP-1 is the unique design of its various tools. It’s familiar but idiosyncratic enough that it requires an adjustment in my workflow. As a result, I wind up making music with it that I could have only made on the OP-1.

This is true for a lot of the synth engines and effects, but it’s also a fact of its on-board multi-track recorder, which is modeled after a four-track cassette recorder — the first type of recording I’d ever done back when my friend Ryan and I would make music together in high school. The recorder allows you to perform and layer four individual tracks that can then be mixed together and processed through a chain of effects. These tracks can then be mixed down into a single stereo file and exported on to a computer.

The initial four tracks can also all be exported individually as well, but they are “raw” in the sense that they can not be exported with the effect processing done on the OP-1.

After arranging this track on the plane, I looked at my collection of exported files once I arrived at my destination in Oakland. I imported each individual track into Pro Tools to give myself as much freedom as possible in mixing the sounds of the tracks I had recorded. Then I started playing with integrating the more processed stereo track before, ultimately, layering more effects on to that track as well.

The result is something I would go to do with a few more tracks that had reached this level of completion on the OP-1: remixing the raw tracks before having them give way to a more abstract version of the same arrangement. As I was thinking more about the growing venn diagram between these tracks and Inherent Vice, the result of this approach began to represent the central idea of the novel, things ending only to return as a hazier version of their former selves.

Another detail I appreciated about this track, which I would go on to incorporate more, is the way an added layer of delay effected some of the static noise from one of the original tracks. Through the second half of this arrangement, there is a vague rising and falling that could almost be beach waves but are, in fact, a blend of synth and delay. Throughout the album, I’d try and find different ways to either a) process captured water sounds to make them less natural and synthetic or b) design synth sounds or effects that would sound more like ocean waves.

that day in the rain

When I arrived in Sebastopol, my friend Dan, let be borrow his acoustic guitar. On Sunday, while I was still on EST, I woke up early to a rain storm that I would eventually be informed was something called an “atmospheric river.” After capturing some sounds of the rain storm, I started tracking with the acoustic.

The final result is the only track to not have a single synth in its mix. Everything you hear is either the sample of the rain falling, which has been processed to sound almost like static, or an acoustic guitar. Aside from the obvious tie of falling rain, this passage seemed to fit this track because of the simple chord progression at its center.

In the film adaptation, this flashback sequence, which provides an emotional center to the narrative as its structured in the movie, is set to “Journey Through the Past” by Neil Young. Considering this is about as folky as this album would get, that tenuous spiritual tie only seemed to make it more appropriate.

It may be worth noting the way this track also concludes with “synthetic waves” for a lack of a better term. It’s a result of the delay I placed on the sample of the rain falling, which I thought would provide a workable transition into “Sonny.”

Sonny

This is the only track to not have a title pulled from Inherent Vice. As a result, it’s the most personal addition to the album. The track was inspired by an evening I had spent watching a sunset on the beach in Ocean Beach, San Diego. It was a perfectly clear night and crowds had gathered to pay especially close attention as the sun began to dip behind the ocean. One thing I’ll always keep with me is the image of a man running across the beach to stand with his friends.

“Bullshit, you’re not watching the sunset without me,” he said.

After the sun fully disappeared, everyone cheered. At first, I chuckled. It seemed like a silly thing to do, frankly. Then, I began to think about the long history of the sun as a metaphor for life and death, particularly in regard to early humans who were first coming to grips with the idea of their own mortality. It struck me that celebrating the sunset was like celebrating death and what made that possible was the idea that it would rise again tomorrow. Again, this seemed obvious as I thought about it. I mean, it’s one of the world’s oldest metaphors for a reason. At the same time, it’s one of the world’s oldest metaphors for a reason.

Later, I went back to my room and began to arrange this track around these ideas. It opens on a D minor chord, with a synth sound that is my attempt to recreate the funeral organ for a flashback sequence in Silence of the Lambs. This progression fades into noise. When it’s reintroduced, it’s accompanied by a bass note. Instead of playing a D in the bass to emphasize the minor chord, I decided to play a Bb. This reorients the arrangement from D minor to F major and creates a juxtaposition between a sunset and sunrise.

I named the track “Sonny” after my grandfather, who was called that as a nickname. I remember, when I was a kid, asking my mom where it came from. I can’t remember her exact answer (I was very young) but it was something to the tune of, “I’m not sure, but maybe it has to do with how he can brighten up everyone’s day.”

Given all these ideas of life, death, sunrise and sunset, this generational and personal tie seemed too fitting to title this track with anything from a work of fiction, especially since these ideas of change, forward motion and endings are so present in the novel.

above the megalopolis

Under this entire track is a field recording made during sunset at the Mulholland Drive overlook, where you can get that famous view of the valley. The recording consists mostly of crickets and passing cars (or nature and mechanics). My idea was to run this track through a stereo delay so the sound of the cars would take on the quality of a synth’s noise as it pans from left to right and vice versa, a sound my friend and collaborator Elaine Rasnake, who mastered this record, will gladly tell you is something I love to include. The cars, as they moved across the stereo audio field, simply provided a new way to generate that sound.

The arrangement was recorded entirely in the “Red Room” (pictured at the beginning of this blog) in Pasadena after a night of driving around listening to the other tracks I’d recorded up to that point and visiting various locations from Boogie Nights, which was filmed in the valley.

P.S. Beware of the Golden Fang!!!

Unlike previous moon watcher albums, tracking this record was much more of a sprint than a marathon. Normally, I put moon watcher tracks away for a few months so I can come back and listen with fresh ears. Once I determined I wanted to limit myself to two weeks of tracking, I had to approach this album in an entirely different way.

Eventually, I began to see habits forming from ideas and knew, while there were ways I could make variations, I was brushing up on the boundaries of what would give way to repetitiveness.

While in San Diego, I stayed with my friend Ryan — the same friend who’d made music with me on cassettes in high school — and his wife Megan. We were talking about the project and I’d mentioned how I’d caught myself returning to the same chord progressions. Soon, we were working out ideas that could compliment and expand on what I’d done already.

For a mood, I suggested we channel something “noir-ish,” and Ryan sat down at his keyboard and started piecing out a simple progression we could build around. After recording his keyboards and some synths, we sampled the sliding glass door that led from the guest room to the back yard as well as the sound of the dryer running. I then ran those sounds through the OP-1 and those became the percussive elements that underscore this track.

Originally, I was so taken with how different it was from everything else, I wasn’t sure it would fit. After playing it for a few friends, though, we all came to think it could provide some tension at the center of the album, which I think, instead of a sore thumb, really makes the whole album more cohesive.

Sous les pavés, la plage!

If “…Golden Fang” provides tension at the center of the album, this track is the beginning of the transition to catharsis and the opening sounds are designed to represent that idea. The track begins with an effected recording of the waves crashing on Manhattan Beach, just down from where I’d sat to capture the record that opens the album. As I was recording the ocean, a helicopter, heading north, flew past the beach. These sounds are mixed in an attempt to make them a mostly unrecognizable cacophony as the album moves out of its central conflict.

The track then moves into a synth arrangement that is a slight variation on some of the more familiar ideas from the rest of the record. Recorded in San Diego after Ryan and I had completed our arrangement, I felt more confident returning to these ideas and had even made the working title for this track “thesis,” as if I felt more sure of what I had been getting at the rest of my trip.

*French graffiti. I apologize for being unable to credit the original photographer.*

Its title on the album, then, is the original French from which the album’s title (and Inherent Vice’s dedication page) is derived. It’s a slogan from a French protest movement that occurred in May 1968 in which students began building barricades out of stones that had removed from the streets. The process revealed sand used as a base and this phrase was developed to illustrate their views on urbanization.

This movement is related to Situationist International, a political movement that was prominent in Europe from 1957 to 1972. One of the movements defining texts is Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, which was published in 1967 and is another personal favorite.

beginning to shift color and fade

I had written a song about ephemera back in 2015 and titled it “Polaroids Have No Negatives,” which was lifted from this same passage in Inherent Vice. It remains one of my favorite images from the novel.

This track itself was recorded at the dining room table in my cousin’s apartment in Oakland one morning with no real direction. It’s very much just a series of improvisations that led to this final product. The name felt fitting, however, with the way the track builds to a crescendo before fading to the sound of what sounds like voices but is clearly not human.

Amethyst

The other proper noun in these album titles is a fictional one, lifted from the character of a young girl in Inherent Vice. In the novel, Amethyst is born to heroin addicts. If anyone is familiar with stones, the purple Amethyst is said to have protective and healing qualities, but its name is derived from the Greek “amethystos.” This can be translated as “not drunken.”

One of the greatest highlights of my trip was spending time with my friend’s young family. Specifically, I was thrilled to have time to bond with their young daughter. Our time playing together is represented a few ways on this track.

First, there are percussive sounds that come from playing with musical toys that were around the house. We sat with my microphone and played together.

The second set of sounds were recorded on a hike to a small lake. My friend let his daughter indulge her curiosity by playing in the water a little. I was lucky enough to be there, with my mic, to capture the sounds of her laughing and playing in the water.

the orange light (watching the ocean)

I think it’s more fun to leave a lot of these passages for folks to discover on their own, but I didn’t know how else to explain why the second to last song is pulled from this excerpt without totally butchering Pynchon’s writing:

It had been dark at the beach for hours, he hadn't been smoking much and it wasn't headlights – but before she turned away, he could swear he saw light falling on her face, the orange light just after sunset that catches a face turned to the west, watching the ocean for someone to come in on the last wave of the day, in to shore and safety.

Of course it does. It did.

This final piece is unlike anything on the album in that it’s simply a processed piece pulled from recordings I had made on the grounds of Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills. I had found a quiet place on the grounds near a fountain where I could also hear some chirping birds.

The thing about listening to the world in headphones, channeled through a microphone is, sometimes, you hear details might otherwise miss. In this case, I noticed the sound of a leaf blower as someone was doing maintenance on a lawn near by. I couldn’t help but think of how all of it — the birds, the constructed fountain and its running water, the worker being paid to maintain someone else’s property and the class dynamics involved in that — all fit right into the center of that venn diagram between this album and the novel I’d been reading on my trip.

I wanted to maintain that, but also process it to near-oblivion through crushing the bitrate of the recording and running that through delays and reverbs and then include it as one last piece that embodies everything that went into making this album.