The Ember and the Children

The Ember and the Children

Present Day, May 2026Children of the Ember closes the album because the geometry is not complete without the closing movement, and the closing movement is not ruin but emergence.I have watched the Black Death move through Europe in the 14th century. I was not present...
The Libraries They Left Behind

The Libraries They Left Behind

Constantinople, November 3, 1494The city has been Ottoman for forty years. The scholars who fled westward after the fall took what they could carry. What they could not carry remained, and what remained is what drew me here: the libraries no one thought to burn...
Which Part of the Testimony Speaks to You

Which Part of the Testimony Speaks to You

Present Day, May 2026I am curious. After decades of recording the observation internally, writing in journals and letters that were not shared, making music that was not released, I am finding the experience of having the testimony be public a genuinely strange...
The Workshop on the Via dei Servi

The Workshop on the Via dei Servi

Florence, October 14, 1471He was not yet thirty and already the most unsettling mind in any room he entered. I watched him from across Verrocchio’s workshop today, where he was bent over a drawing of a water wheel, cross-hatching shadow with his left hand in a...
Ashes of Tomorrow: The Reckoning

Ashes of Tomorrow: The Reckoning

Present Day, May 2026Ashes of Tomorrow is the penultimate movement in the arc, and it is the one that allowed me to do something that the rest of the album does not allow: grieve.The other tracks are built from restraint. The architecture of the album requires the...
The Testimony Is Delivered: World Goth Day

The Testimony Is Delivered: World Goth Day

Present Day, May 23, 2026The Geometry of Ruin is in the world. World Goth Day. May 22 has passed and the album exists now in the way that things that have been released exist: no longer mine in any exclusive sense, belonging to whoever hears it and brings their own...