Building a world

Its been a long time since I created an album. It still seems like yesterday I was getting lost in the production of a new exciting idea whose identity I hadn’t fully realized. Back in 2016, I was getting ready to take everything I owned and venture out to L.A starting at the top of the new year of 2017. I had no idea what kind of crazy experience it would bring.

Besides songs about lost love and the struggles of growing up, I had always loved to create music that wasn’t really cool music. The type of stuff they call “scaring the ho’s” music. It made me feel that I’d be more noble and respected by finer classes if I created a movie and composed the soundtrack for that movie. Besides, thats what childhood me had always dreamed of doing. 12 year old me would shred through batteries on my walkman by repeating Eiffel 65’s “Blue”, heart racing and having closed eye visuals of scenes of my make believe characters using their special powers, running and jumping around, and for some reason, they would all be imagined running around in the new neighborhood I lived in rural Michigan. Music truly felt like a drug, I mean, notice I said closed eye visuals, racing heart. Experiencing music when you’re young is the best. I could have those visuals in silence too, but music just ignited my imagination and I’d basically have real-time created music videos streaming in my head. I never really let that ability go. So the mind show I was having at 25 years old in 2016 was being imagined no differently than how 12 year old me imagined scenes while listening to my walkman. Only then, it was music that I was creating.

Back in 2009, I had a newly built computer that a friend of mine from 2nd grade helped me build. Funnily enough, he was the one that helped me become the computer nerd that I was. My mother had a office she used for her business in our basement, but she slowly moved out of it when she bought a storefront. That became my new and improved studio, an upgrade from the corner of the other side of the basement next to one of the toilet pipes. I had cracked Fruity Loops 5, Ableton Live 5 and Adobe Audition. I was pretty proficient with FL Studio by then. I cracked Fruity Loops Studio 3 back in 2002 and had been using FL ever since (well, until I fell in love with Ableton). I made a bunch of songs that later in 2010 I would end up utilizing with tracks I created that year. During the summer of 2010, I scoured Tumblr and ran into a painting I couldn’t escape from. It was of a ghostly face nestled in tan clouds and tears dripping from its eyes that were made of blood. I don't believe I thought too hard about it, I just immediately selected it, did some edits to it and it became the album art of an album I would call The Devil’s Symphony. I imagine I eventually had some grandiose plot behind the title, but I do not recall it any longer. That painting I would later learn was that of who I revere as one of my favorite late painters of all time, Zdzisław Beksiński.

Beksiński’s work had always been around, but it was something about 2016 that brought him back into full attention. By then I had collected (digitally) a bunch of his paintings and started to throw them up on a secondary screen as I composed an idea. I would do this with photographs from Flickr and Tumblr too. It was “scoring” but to still photos. It wasn’t that I was trying to describe the photo with music, but better yet, extracting the energy of the visual to make the music mnemonic. One day I decided to pull up all of Beksiński’s artwork and start tinkering with sounds. This is what began the development of Nocturnia.

above are rough snippets of track ideas

His use of colors, shape and subject just opened a portal of excitement in my head. It stirred me to create music that felt windy, dusty, unsettling in areas, bleak in others, but polished with a beautiful finish. The first instrumental I created I titled “Strange Bedfellows”. It was made with more of a “beat” convention in mind more than a score, but I loved how uncertain and desolate it feels. Pictured left is the painting that kept being the center of attention whilst creating the instrumental. I can honestly say I don’t even know why it was. However, it was observed during the creation of a few different cuts such as another I created titled “Dark lullabies”. This was a more dramatic melody but still with a beat convention rather than a score.

Every creator self sabotages though, right? I quickly started to draw a blank as to how I was going to create a compelling, cohesive and conceptual album with such a large fantasy design. I honestly started to think it was stupid so doubt seeped in hard. I was always caught in hell storms of apprehension over who the audience would even be for such music. Any time I wasn’t spending on making modern material, I felt like I was doing a disservice to myself and making it hard for people to get into my work. That thinking would scrap the path I were headed on and blossomed the idea of transforming this project into a more modern music style. One that could perhaps be a bit more well received by a general audience. By now, I was already a full year living in L.A and had formed the 11 track self produced, recorded and mixed album titled whereisspadey. Visually, I kept remnants of the dark theme of Nocturnia. Not full scale because the vibe of the album was certainly its own thing, but there was influence of weirdness in some of the instrumentation. Mostly choirs and minor chords. My management at the time hated all the darkness. I rebelled against that because, well, I always made sure I expressed what was genuinely me. Darkness for me wasn’t always to be made out to be horrible or nightmarish. Which so happened to also be the way that Beksiński talked about his work.

After the release of whereisspadey, I would continue to daydream about Nocturnia. At that point, I lived in two places. A $2,150 studio apartment in Koreatown, Los Angeles and my buddies rented house in Cerritos, CA. By late afternoon or early evening, I would drive about an hour down to their place and the four of us would have nights with the boys nearly every night of the week. This consisted of playing things like NHL on Playstation 4 and then eventually that turned into multiplayer sessions on the mobile app Fun Run. We were fanatics of that for awhile. Later, we all discovered the magic of what we called “Rip n Rides”. The activity of Rip n Rides consisted of having a pedal bike, a pair of headphones (we all sported BEATS by Dre headphones), tokes from a weed vape and a mind full of wondrous ideas to fantasize about on the almost two hour cruise round-trip starting at around 10PM from Cerritos to Seal Beach. On those rides, we’d argue that anyone’s mind would be fully cracked open to a world of positive manifestations and realizations. The landscapes you traveled through must of had an effect. We all had visions. Me…I constantly tried to squeeze out imaginative thought for the plot of Nocturnia,

I seriously must have squeezed my mind clean of imagination. I constantly repeated the same 5 tracks on those rides waiting for an a-HA scene to materialize in my head. Indeed it was slightly psychotic. It wasn’t even that I was trying to figure out lyrical content. By that point, I had realized that I was trying to create the soundtrack to a film that didn’t exist yet, and while listening to what I had composed, I wanted the scenes in my head to help me realize a comprehensive plot. When we would make it back home, everyone would shut down and go to bed. Then there was me, on the reclining love seat that was known as “the cockpit”, my throne of the house, and scan through not only Beksiński’s work but a few others work whom I enjoyed like Ernst Fuchs. Eventually my mind would collapse and I’d go to bed too but the next night would likely consist of the same activity.

For whereisspadey, I was in the midst of creating a music video for a cut called “Good 4 It”. That turned out as a successful project. I hired a great cinematographer, Gregory Faltek. A young woman who had been following my work for awhile via Instagram named Kyla, and we were also blessed with Shaina Paulson, a wonderful makeup artist. Being my first ever music video (that wasn’t self shot and had a crew) it helped me to realize that my ideas were all possible to create, and so I actually tried to recruit others to help bring this Nocturnia idea to life. By 2018, I had a bit better of an idea of what the story would be so I thought it would be a good idea to try to collect film contacts in the L.A area to hire. I had particular sequence that plagued my head. I knew it at the time to be the opening sequence theme for Nocturnia. This theme alone took up most of the Rip n Ride time just trying to imagine a scene that made sense with the music. You can listen to this sequence below.

I met with another cinematographer one morning at a cafe in town. I basically explained to her that the plot wasn’t exactly fully realized, but I wanted to shoot this sequence that involved a large group of cloaked townsfolk walking behind a slave. He was being led to the site of the mouth of Nocturnia where powerful witches would perform a ritual that opened this colossal mouth in the earth and devour the slave, thus porting him to Nocturnia. I also imagined this large hallowed coffin that ripped a hole into the fabric of the atmosphere and pulled the slave inward. So I wanted this large coffin to be built. I’m sure that lady thought I was insane. I kept her in my pocket but we never did connect again. I also met with a model I admired named Gaby Herstick who I thought was extremely beautiful and perfect for the scene. I was cooking with energy and determination but unfortunately I had given up on the sequence being created. I built into the story a bit more and shared it with one of the peers that helped me to make the Good 4 It video. I ultimately had set the entire thing down only revisiting it a couple times while on our new Rip n Ride location, which was off the pacific coast since my buddies had moved to Redondo Beach. I too would eventually move there during the last phase of my L.A stay. My California tour would come to a close late 2019. Inches away from the pandemic.

We fast forward to the start of 2025. I’m fresh out of a 3 year relationship and was unknowingly walking into the start of a voyage through multiple layers of a ghastly grief. I had moved into a new home following the breakup in what I feel like was by whirlwind of a force. I didn’t have much time to process anything, I was just in a odd state of stillness, disappointment and anger. The winter brought a period of incubation. I was always much of a night lurker. I found a couple of bars close to my new home that I would duck off into at night and just reflect. This wasn’t a period of being an alcoholic, but yet more of a grab a bite, a beer and be at peace kind of thing. It brought many great conversations and energies I definitely thought would be useful to retell in later music. I created a nightly ritual on my days off of work faring off to these places and coming back home to musically channel a bit of what energy I had garnered.

Winter turned spring, spring turned summer and as an avid traveler, I continued to make my travels where I collected strong bouts of energy that would be channeled into music creation as well. That energy created an entirely different branch of work that I will perhaps pick up to develop for the summer of 2026. My personal feelings continued to swing with irrationality. It felt good to be free of the agony that I experienced in the relationship, but there was so many uncapped nerve endings that were still connected to it and the person I was with. I missed them. The grief grew in such a strange manner throughout the remainder of the summer into the fall. I always felt a call back to the spaces where I cultivated it all. I was still in disbelief of the disbandment. That is what drew me back into the idea of Nocturnia once more by September. I found that Nocturnia was a state of being. For familiarity, one could say its like Silent Hill. It’s a state of being that collects your conscious, in a metaphysical manner, and makes you traverse its dismal experience day after day until you learn how not to accept its invitation any longer. I had revitalized the idea of Nocturnia from where I left it back in 2018. Today, it is being developed as a fantasy novel. The novel explores a whole world that the album adaptation won’t. So in many cases, they are two separate things now. The album is titled Lost In Nocturnia. The theme of Nocturnia will still be used for a film adaption, and instrumentation like that of Strange Bedfellows are reworked and will be featured on the album.

If this all sounds confusing to you, don’t worry, it still is to me as well! But this journey has been such a vast and interesting one. Thankfully, I have developed the album to feel fairly decent. Its not really trying to cling so hard to the fantasy element. Now that I’m a lot older, I don’t mind it following a more practical approach thematically, but the fantasy is implied. Its using real life events but dressed in a newly realized vibe of Nocturnia. Genre wise, it’s a space between Trip-Hop and alternative rock with a couple super mix it up moments.

As mentioned earlier about myself back years ago, I always get caught in a hell storm of apprehension. That would prove no different still to this day and its what lead me to release a more modern style piece of music called “Let Me Find Out” in the summer of 2025. It was my first release pretty much since 2017 although in 2021, I did do a re-release of whereisspadey. I wanted to show that despite all my weird material, I still very much love modern but customary approaches to rap and pop. Surprisingly, I had a made a second release as well. This was for the song Nocturnal Luv which was also featured on whereisspadey. Issues with my distributor rendered the album to be removed from Spotify. It however is still live on Apple Music, but I mostly considered the project gone. October was approaching and I wanted the excuse to re-release it for Halloween. It originally was going to feature on Lost in Nocturnia, but this was before I made the decision to make the album a bit different thematically.

I foolishly told myself that I would have the project completed by the end of October 2025, and if that wasn’t going to be the case, definitely by mid December. We’re in 2026 and I’ve obviously let that idea go. I was so very adamant about releasing Lost in Nocturnia during the fall because that was when my grief had swelled the worse. I felt it were important to release the project for the fall because its hands down the defining energy of the album. If you can remember from earlier, I said the development started in September, so to believe it would be finished and polished by October when half the tracks weren’t even recorded yet was foolish.

Before my departure from Instagram, I created a reel that displayed me making progress on a cut I call Paranormal Activity on the album. Updates about this song had first lived in my stories, but I brought it to reels to reach a wider audience. My reach on Instagram has literally always been laughable, so I didn’t gain much reception there, but an upload to YouTube shorts rendered more reception than my best months combined on Instagram.

This is where we’re currently at with this project. Still in development. I know that the coming spring months will dissipate my interest in it, as new music takes its place for a moment, but I am challenging myself to stick to it and release it for the fall of 2026. We’re currently sitting at 9 songs and I’m looking forward to finally finishing this. The novel development is a completely different story that I will perhaps document for you all here on my website.