Guests

(2016-Present) My songwriting and recording project. Originally began as a 'singing band' in Seattle, I gathered a small group of friends to sing a collection of songs written about travel & the idea of 'home'. I was working as dough prepper for a pizza company in Seattle at the time & for every practice I would make a pizza or two for everyone to share. Live performance was done with only myself on acoustic guitar and three to four singers brandishing various hand percussion instruments. For a time it evolved into a four piece rock band, as recorded on some tracks on the album "am" (2022).

Wire Department

(2020-2021) An electronic music project. Described by my friend Adel Bengo as sounding like the instruments waking up & trying to play themselves. In the late twenty-teens I worked at a coffee shop with Maya McGrory and we would obsess about the idea of building a synthesizer together. I had become enthralled with synthesis after a friend paid me rent to sublet my room with an MS-20 while I was on tour. Maya was still in school, studying Physics but was beginning to collaborate on Chanel Beads with Shane Lavers as well as writing her own music as Colle. We would spend hours during our shifts talking about music & production & krautrock. Eventually, we finally made concrete plans. Maya had found an electronics parts store on the eastside & we drove over to Bellevue in her mom's cadillac escalade. We bought breadboards and transistors and everything else we thought we would need to build a VCO - the first piece in our crazy project. The upstairs of the store had a sign declaring the entire second level "WIRE DEPARTMENT" & much to our delight it was scattered with spools of all different types & gauges of wire. We never got further than purchasing all these parts -- I believe I still have them all in a box somewhere in storage -- but in 2020 between the beginning of the Lockdown and the beginning of the George Floyd Uprising I made a slew of electronic instrumentals. Dreaming of a better world to come, I decided to name it in honor of our unrealized dream: WIRE DEPARTMENT.