“fish got legs” is available in mp3 form below, and a limited-release of cds is in the making.

i can’t resist writing a little about this project. until this week, i hadn’t properly completed an album since high school. certainly my taste and the character of my creative output has changed much–and into directions unimagined when i was eighteen–in the last six years. i’m pleased to share, at long last, some of my recent creative work, some fruits of growth.

it’s very easy to play music, to experiment. but for me it’s quite difficult to work consciously toward the idea of a completed work. the idea becomes an abstract obsession, constantly reshaped by my imagination, while the actual work fails to resolve with the ideal, or seems unfathomable when i sit down to play. fortunately, topher cyll came along with “narmo”–national album recording month–in may of 2006. here was a great exercise in focus and motivation: the album had to be completed in thirty-one days. while i had imagined, prior to may, an evolutionary-themed project, once the clock was ticking i was pressured to focus on the material at hand in its own right, as growing bodies of sound, rather than pass time thinking ideologically.

quickly i realized that, although i was not intentionally creating music “about evolution” (especially since i dropped all lyrical content), the process of creating these songs was precisely one of mutation and selection. i recorded some proto-songs and began taking pieces of these songs and mixing them together, building by addition and subtraction. once some elemental structure was there, the songs, like embryos, grew naturally (with a good deal of nurturing of course).

when june first hit, i was happy to have recorded an album, though i hesitated to call it complete. i took a break this summer before returning to the work with fresh ears. i’m still reluctant to call it “complete,” but these mixes excite me. although i didn’t intend it, “fish got legs” is the perfect title for this album insofar as it’s only a moment in my artistic evolution–a fossil documenting a period of growth, of moving toward new terrain. i only hope to continue to grow, and i welcome all of you to spend some time with this music. thank you!