Full running time: 32:30.

Lining (silk, album, what have you):

I can only begin to reign in the joyfully, almost ritualistically dancing matrix of recognitions the making of this album continues to enliven, over a year since I began creating it. I was in a similar state to that during which I made its predecessor, "The Convincing Actor Is: Jersey Girl Forever." A fabric of chronic illness and spasmodic trauma responses manifested itself in quite the multiplicity of symptoms, each of which seemed almost interchangeable with any other. That which influenced my music most was the intrusive feeling that I was incapable of "liking anything," incapable of associating any object or work of art with the assumed pleasure response, and, at the slightest hint of returning pleasure, a visceral wave of gratitude and cosmic thankfulness. Such was a hyperbolic fixation on the momentary quality of pleasure. (In my return to relative sanity, I know that all enjoyable things do not provide conscious joy to full capacity at all times, otherwise one would be completely mad, experience a sort of transcendence tantamount to psychosis or depersonalization, and probably diagnosable as such).

This fixated thinking led me to aggressively pressure the generation of melodies and harmonies which felt virtually perfect, a combination of licks and phrases which I'd internalized, since childhood, were doubtless approximations of what it was to feel bliss... what would make any receptive listener drop their social expectations to the floor like silverware and open their humanity like an ear, had they even to tear through psychological cartilage like an animal. These melodies and harmonies became the foundation of the album, present in tracks 3, 4, 5, 8 and 9, all of which portray my childhood conceptualizations of exactly communicative melody, ones which were always easy to "feel," but hard to physically actualize until adulthood.

Another symptom which continued to wrack my experience was ongoing disordered auditory processing, likely induced by a great map of trauma both physical and psychological, alcohol abuse, untreated ADHD, OCD and PTSD, and pandemic-era seclusion. Just as I overexerted myself to "feel" music, so was I overexerting in order to hear it "correctly." My overwhelming desire to hear music clear through to its core identity, an impossible and laughably tragic feat, led to delusions I was going deaf, and led me to listen too closely, finding strange dissonance, tonal inconsistencies, and altogether unexpected error in all sound, from pop songs to my head's brushing against a pillow. What I could still get a grip on was intentional dissonance; while experimenting, I ran a drum track I'd made through an oldish boombox of mediocre quality. When I recorded the track, playing it through the boombox, back through the microphone in my computer, the peculiarity of the resultant timbre astonished me, especially at utterly distorting volumes. I furthermore reasoned that pairing the mellifluous melodies I had in mind with these harsh, triple-produced drums, would lead to a sonic description of what it felt like for me to listen to any music at all. To experience everything cast in extreme, unlikely contrasts, and to be chronically incapable of relaxation or "intended" listening experience (though, to some artists, I may have been listening just right).

"Body in the Meanwhile" therefore takes equal joy in pure pop bliss and an overarching sonic commentary which both muckily subsumes and starkly presents my bliss. It is a conceptual deconstruction of the way my particular experiences with mental illness, addiction and trauma led to a very particular listening experience, in which there once seemed no feasible difference between literal sound and interior desire. This framing is, as always, shaped by my love of mystical theology, the history of world religion and human consciousness, and the ever-present, and subtly controversial, usage of American pop as a tool for navigation and deduction in regards to collective identity. To stop overstating it, I hope it's a delightful and emotional example of creativity under stress, and a breed of noisy, well-crafted art pop that makes you as happy as can be. I hope it puts your own trauma into perspective, as something both rich and complex as it is worthy of healing... I hope you know that you are worthy of singing as though the memory of having always sung, of having done nothing else, has spontaneously germinated within you. What can be found needs no source!