The Work

EnigmaCurry and I wanted to build something around pure spontaneity, the thing I'm fascinated by: how people come up with whole pieces on the spot. So we wrote a rule and posted it on the SoundCloud page. One session. No do-overs. You get a single sit-down with a piece of music, and that's it; if you leave early or something interrupts you, you stop where you are and send it over. Once it's been worked, it's done.

I'd come up with melodic lines, chord progressions, sometimes audio files for beats, and send them to Ryan. He'd reconceptualize the whole thing into an ambient piece and send it back, and I'd decide whether to add anything before we called it. Word spread through people we'd each already worked with: all six seasons carry collaborators, with the middle ones drawing more hands than the outer edges, sometimes four to eight people at once. Every track got its own cover, a fractal Ryan generated on the spot. The titles came out of our actual conversation while making each piece, and sometimes he'd take the text where I described the audio and turn it into an anagram for the title. Six seasons in all, thirteen tracks each, most of them cranked out inside a year to eighteen months before COVID eased and life pulled us elsewhere. My favorites are seasons one and two; two is the strangest and most breathtaking, one wins on texture, and season four and parts of five hold up too.

The music itself isn't technically remarkable, and I won't pretend it is. The innovation was the concept: the one-session rule, the anagram titles, the fractals generated in the moment. And it's one of the few genuinely long-term, consistent projects I've ever sustained, which is rare for me. A highlight of the early years, concept first.