rotting.

rotting. was written in recovery from a psychosis, while I was processing what had happened and how I felt during it. A lot of what it explores reaches beyond the psychosis, though. It's about identity fragmenting to the point where the self dissolves, and the crucible of what's left: someone lost, confused, in need, alone, pleading, desperate. I wanted to expose that part of myself.

If the way we are is a state, what's at the bottom? What's left without one? What if every capability you have to understand, to intellectualise, to tell the internal from the external, were gone? Are we anything without them?

The idea had been brewing for a while. During that time I'd recorded myself on my phone playing guitar and singing. Those sessions were a way to cope, and I recorded them out of habit, not because I meant to use them. Once I had an Octatrack and was comfortable with it, it was only a matter of time before the idea and the recordings came together. Making it out of past fragments, the recordings from that time and the rest of my own material, felt inevitable.

Each track is one Octatrack project with a single pattern. I chose the samples and mangled them into a shape I liked. Then I used scenes and the crossfader to make movement, modulation, transitions and sections, and performed each one live, mixing by hand from scene to scene. That's what you hear.