Milieu - The Flower to Disappear (2022)

The Flower to Disappear is, as many of my albums have been before it, a confluence of ideas, themes and patterns, woven painstakingly together into a tapestry that is hopefully pleasurable and diverting enough that it betrays the utterly cartoonish amount of work that went into creating it. I broke ground on it last year, in an isolated session that produced "Planet Everfree" for a Cottage Industries compilation album, without quite realizing that I'd already begun writing the record. Sometime around my daughter's 10th birthday, I could feel it happening, and sensing the approaching work, rolled my sleeves up and dove right in.

The weeks that followed were filled with some of the most scatterbrained and wildly unhinged creative tangents I've obsessed over since perhaps Sun Cast, although, like having children, the traumas and stresses of the creative act become largely forgotten as you begin to gain some distance from the work, and were this not true, no one would ever make more than one record. The Flower to Disappear is so full of polymetric composition and incommensurable patterns that much of the definition of each melodic or rhythmic event becomes slightly eroded beneath the hazy surface of the final mix. Every song included here has been revisited a dozen times or more, overdubbed upon like airbrushed paint, melted down, reformed, broken apart and rearranged into something that hopefully conveys a pop music sensibility.

Despite the dense and complex processes that went into creating this music, pop music was always the ideal goal - something accessible, easy to listen to, topical and relatable - and although pop music does not tend to be a regular aspect of electronic music most of the time (at least in my own experiences), I find that pop music's general method of directness is a useful tool to apply to electronic music's unbounded and experimental nature. For example, imagine your favorite drummer. Then, imagine what they may have been able to accomplish if they were able to operate in not only the percussive force, punctuation and decibel-level domains their instrument exists within - what if they could affect pitches within each drum hit? Glissandos? What if they could reverse their kit like samples in a sampler, or sporadically shift the texture, fidelity and stereo placement of the instrument?

I don't know if I've managed to accomplish any of this, at least as it appeared to manifest in my mind. I think that, 1000+ releases down the line, I have become more and more content with each album being what it wants to become, allowing myself to be less and less uptight about the "what" of the work and focus instead on the "how" of the work. So here we are again, as we always are, me orating out into the blank white void of this digital space, hoping that somewhere, you're listening, or reading, or remembering - perhaps all three. If you are, there is really only one message I'd like to impart with The Flower to Disappear, and it is this:

Take time for yourself, and for those you love, so that when the world outside your door requires that you roll your own sleeves up and step out into the uncertainty of it, you and your loved ones are that much better prepared to handle the inevitable suffering that will come your way. Find the things that make you happy, and enjoy doing them. Help others do the same, as much as you can. Try to learn from this each time, and understand that discovering things is truly one of the finest joys that this ridiculous life has to offer. The Flower to Disappear is the accumulation of many such things that I have discovered along the way, things I get excited about doing, seeing, listening to, talking about and sharing here with you. It is a defined branch in the path, where I may hold out my palm and offer you a momentary scenic route as a passenger. We'll get back on the main road again soon enough, don't you worry. I know where this road leads, as I've taken it many times over, and I think you'll like it. We can roll the windows down and hear the birds, feel the sunshine, or we can stay behind them, voyeurs taking in the uninterrupted splendor of the view. Your choice is your choice, and there are no wrong answers. As Harrison once said, "I'm happy just to dance with you"

So please accept my Flower to Disappear - a mere whiff of its magical blue petals, and we'll be off - bounding through a surrealistic landscape, happy to be carried for a while - and we can stay here as long as we'd like. The album, musically as well as thematically, has been designed to be functionally recursive - it ends only if and when we wish it to - and like all the little ripples in that cool pond, dappling outward from a single sinking flower, we'll remember all the times that came before, because remembering is also completely up to us. We can keep the happy, and subtract the sad - or maybe keep just a little of the sad, because it's where you've been, and not where you're going, that makes you who you are. A million branching paths behind us, a million conscious and subconscious decisions, all leading us both to this terminus of the here and the now, to the us of ourselves. This Flower to Disappear, it is only the next choice we can make, but just as each of those millions of decisions were necessary to bring us here, we must always decide where we will go next. So please, for my sake and for yours and for everyone else's, let us choose to be happy. Let us choose to continue, together