I discovered Dutch musician Eelco Topper’s project Felbm a few years ago via the Spotify Algorithm. His “Tape” series was really great (this song is particular is my favorite) and I’ve really fallen in love with his “Elements of Nature” release as it uses a lot of metal and wood percussion instruments (which I’m really fond of as well). This film by Pierre Zylstra does a good job of showcasing Felbm’s unique workflow and creative process.

I understand that the “Self-Help” genre is not for everyone as it’s sometimes hard to distinguish good, educated advice from something that might be closer to a sensationalized ploy to sell books. And taken a step further, I realize that any books that might reference eastern philosophy might also not be for everyone. But I first saw a documentary that features Thich Nhat Hanh about the benefits of mindfulness and it was very helpful for me to understand how my priorities and focus on productivity was unsustainable and ultimately very unhealthy. Peace Is Every Step was the first book of his that I read and I treated it like a daily devotional - reading short passages every day. A lot of the ideas in the book connect well to some of the other poetry I’ve shared as it stresses the importance of being present and aware of what’s around you. Hanh would say that its only during these moments that you are truly living.

My personal listening taste has become a lot more utilitarian over the last few years. Often I’m just looking for a song that makes me feel relaxed or that creates a nice atmosphere. The Sam Wilkes and Jacob Mann’s collaborative album is great but I was particularly drawn to the live performances of the songs they posted on Youtube. The song “Soft Landing” is particularly good IMO as it showcases their minimalist approach and great playing skills. Be sure and check out the rest of the videos as well.

This might only be interesting to graphic design nerds, but the typeface used for this album has a rich and interesting history. I found it after a brief obsession with the Fluxus art movement. The movement is hard to summarize as it’s quite varied but it was very experimental and collaborative with some of the playfulness of Dada and often incorporating an element of chance.

I kept seeing the same typeface on an IG account I follow that collects random work from the era, and I thought it had a nice balance that was formal but also a bit quirky - which fit with some of my conceptual ideas about the art for the album. Luckily, someone did an amazing job scanning old textpages and building Fluxisch Else - which has some great imperfections like floating baselines and erratic kerning.

I discovered this book a few years ago and was blown away with its originality. It feels like a forgotten text from some ancient civilization. In fact, it was made by an Italian illustrator and designer over the course of 2.5 years back in the late 70’s. Full of whimsy, he even invented a made-up language and alphabet. This video is a great introduction.

I guess the theme for this week is super original, “alien” art, as this album sounds like nothing else I’ve heard before. It is certainly not for everyone, but it blew my mind and inspired a yet-to-be-released experimental album that I made a couple of years ago. The album was made in 1988 using only a primitive sampler - see this short article about some basic background. If you can make it through the atonal sections, there are beautiful moments of melody that appear quickly and then disappear.

I thought this short blog post was interesting and the idea of “glimmers” that it describes is very similar to the awareness I was attempting to cultivate throughout the album making process.

There was a quick shot in the NFAQL doc that showcased a stack of books. One of them was called “The Peace of Wild Things” - which I found very inspiring during the making of the album.

Berry is an extremely prolific writer and activist who’s written in almost every sub-genre possible. However, his book of poems mentioned above is my favorite. Not only do the poems discuss the rejuvenating properties of nature, they often also make light of a type of awareness that if we just pay attention in the present moment there is so much beauty and meaning around us. That practice of mindfulness was an important step for me throughout the making of the album and it has enriched my life tremendously. My favorite poetry inspires this sensation. Check out this short animation of one of Berry’s most popular poems.

I felt burnt out from making music right before starting work on NFAQL and I took about 3 months in early 2022 just making really simple, improvised music. It was the first time in a long time that I wrote just for the fun of it instead of being focused on being productive towards a commercial project. I started playing piano a lot and simply capturing the performances via rough iPhone recordings. When it came time to add “score” music to the documentary it seemed like an obvious place to start. So Kristian picked out a bunch of snippets from my archive. He insisted that we use them “as-is” and not re-record so you can hear a lot of mistakes (as well as background noises like my young son Owen). Here are the recordings that made it in the score.

Kristian and I both are big film fans and have a special love for nonfiction documentary based story-telling. We spent a lot of time sharing inspiration back and forth. These are a few documentaries that we both really liked and that shared some similarity to the NFAQL story.

I’ve enjoyed reading Mary Oliver over the last couple of years.  Not only does she capture beautiful images, but she sheds light on beautiful moments that might otherwise be taken for granted.  I’ve tried to practice this sort of mindfulness and inquisitiveness in my own life. This essay by Maria Popova does a great job of describing the magic of her work.

The first song from NFAQL has a video directed by a filmmaker I’ve been a fan of for a long time, Paul Trillo. It’s also the first commissioned music video created entirely using OpenAI’s Sora text-to-video model. Sora’s not available to the public yet, so it was cool working with Paul to test the limits of what a tool like that could do in the context of a music video that couldn’t have made with any other technology.