Machine Harm: The Harm of a Machine in Full Decimality is my “actual” debut album, released under the Probable Voltages label. This record was the result of roughly 2 years of work with my music, although little of the early music made the final cut.

Machine Harm represents, for myself, a fairly bleak time. I was living for a gap year in Oberlin, Ohio and was extremely frustrated with my life, health, and lack of creative output. I felt an urgent need to create a cohesive album that wasn’t a pity party, to be blunt.

Each track is an amalgam of modular synth patches that I obsessively made, recorded, and destroyed like a mandala. No patches were saved because the spur of the moment was all I was trying to capture. In addition, there was no performance aspect in the patching; each was constructed to be indeterminant, chaotic, and self-orienting.

One distinguishing aspect of this record is its intense stereo field. I treat the stereo field as separate but somewhat interconnected twins. The basis of my patches is typically a monophonic sound unit that I replicate per channel and then treat until there’s an indescribable relationship.

I’ve selected Anguish Caused by Spiced Spaghetti because it best represents both where I was in 2023 and where I’ve been going as of late. There’s a lot more rhythm and nonlinear form in Anguish, as well as spectral intensity.