Warning Light is many things/styles/genres I suppose, but as a person (not a "project") I will always think of myself as an experimental musician. To me, even with melodies or dance beats, they are still experimental songs that all imbedded with their own idiosyncrasies. Through my EPs I've always explored different aspects of what I do sonically, my albums are all like giant puzzles that I fit together with themes and concepts in my head. So the EPs can be a little more freewheeling in some ways, and I suppose I like that. Here is a bit of "director's cut" of these releases, and for the month of October I put them up for free download if you'd like to take a couple home with you.
Life/Death Suite is something different for me, I finally the original outro I meant for
Oftenchance and decided to make an endless loop experience. The original long outro, just called Oftenchance, was meant to make the album a true double LP experience. Putting out an album nearly 79 minutes long seemed a little too much, so I decided to split the releases. Basically, the cassette was designed to be played in an endless, mantra style loop, with
different sections representing different times in a person's life.
Oftenchance was meant to be a kind of commentary on the place "chance" plays in a person's life, the subtle ways those different avenues of chance can alter a person's life forever. I thought of
Life/Death Suite as being a kind of a sister release, it acknowledges those concepts and refines them into a half hour-plus experimental song cycle.
Ambient Summer came out of a series of recordings at my father's lake house. My girlfriend Rachel and I took several vacations up there and I decided every week I would try to make a short, ambient house leaning jam and post it to Soundcloud. It was a fun project for the summer, but I ended up liking several of the songs so much I decided to do a little one off release. These are some of the most immediate tracks I've recorded since the early days when I would mostly jam and do a little editing after the fact.
Largely recorded at the same lake house over several months with the idea of making another album to release on the same day as
Oftenchance (craziness!!!), these tracks were sunbaked psychedelic moments, capture for posterity in a very blissful part of my life. My life soundtrack at the time was just pure Krautrock, Progressive Rock, and Psychedelia, so I definitely think of this is being one of my most spacious recordings.
A Vast Moment collects a series of tracks I originally wanted to be paired with some of the material for
the Lost Patterns album and
Night Time tracks for a much longer, crazier version of
Heavens Above, Heavens Below. The material took a long time to get settled (I started working on
Heavens Above, Heavens Below as a follow up to
Wild Silver in 2011) and these tracks finally started to gel as their own little collection. The title is in reference to my idea that each moment in a person's life can be vast and expansive if you choose to see it that way.
Night Time collects one extremely heavy synthesizer session and several of my tape loop experiments from this "in-between" era from
Wild Silver to
Heavens Above, Heavens Below and
the Lost Patterns. At the time, I felt pretty directionless in this project so this EP brings up a lot of mixed feelings in my heart. But honestly, I'm quite proud of these songs; this and
A Vast Moment probably should have just been a whole album.
Blacked Out was something completely unique for me, a political "single" I put out to stand in protest of the
SOPA/PIPA movement. In my catalogue, it stands as something unique and found me trying to create something more approachable and minimalist at the same time. Of course, seventeen minute singles exist solely as art (not for radios surely), but my heart was in the right place.
Blacked Out was also used in a friend's student film, which definitely jump started my interest in soundtracking.
Before the release of
Wild Silver on Stickfigure, I decided to release two EPs that would dissect my own recording process at the time. New Pilgrimage represented how I worked about half the time during that era: multi-track recordings that layer on various effects and samples. I decided this would be the darker of the two EPs, and there would be more thematic tie-in with that album that came out just after its release.
New Pilgrimage feels like a "sneak preview" in that sense, of what was to come.
Starry Way manifested my other approach, live recordings subjected to repeated cuts and obsessive editing. These tracks were recorded very quickly and then mixed down with live effects in a very rapid fire way, when I worked in that style I set time limits on each track to stop myself from over thinking. The content was definitely space-drone centered I was at the height of my Tangerine Dream obsession in this era of my life.
Early Birds was a one-off experiment recording with my friend Allen. There was a pretty informal element to it, I just wanted to jam with my friend and the jams sounded good live. At the time we were both playing synths in Roman Photos, so these recordings were just kind of fun vacations from our main outlet. This EP came out right around the same time as my first album
Further On.
After I made
Eternity Drones, it took me over three years to write
Further On and find a direction for the band. In that time, I did a little bit of soul searching, and
Unknown Clearing was definitely a part of that. I had yet to figure out a lot of the production elements I would use on
Further On, but some of my ideas were starting to move in that direction. I wanted very badly to be Eno at this point, but who doesn't? There have been times I want to remove this from my band camp, but "In a Silent Trench" reminds me I probably had more future for this project than I realized at the time.
Each one of these represents a little moment in the sounds as they evolved around me. Nothing remains but the moment, the sounds move ever forward across uncharted mysterious terrains.
