Hey Exit – The Bitter Scent of Light

A sixty-six minute and six second tape of instrumental guitar downers.

This album turned out to be a bit of a goodbye to the world of improvised music for me. I had started getting my head into songwriting territory, but I still had years of this rather alien music in my fingers, freeform and feral as anything. At the time, I was digesting as much of the Loren Connors catalog as I could get my hands on, and also had a lot of Stars of the Lid on repeat. I wanted to collide these things, but avoid making a collection of ambient tunes, and instead keep it on the trajectory of Fahey and short-form American guitar instrumentals. The result is a hearty collection of songs with wildly varied processes of construction – some recorded in a single take, others composed and painted together in the DAW; some blasted apart or blown out using broken tape machines and pedals in the studio, others the product of long, strange chains of digital signal processing.

In my personal life, I was in a pretty gnarly place mentally and emotionally. I cried a lot while making this music. It was a lot of late nights with tape machines and various studio tricks, a lot of long walks home from the studio, listening to the evening’s mixes, processing multiple layers of grief that I didn’t yet understand (inasmuch as we ever do).

In the end, The Bitter Scent of Light was one of the most satisfying and true time capsules I’ve fashioned within my little creative labyrinth. When I listen back, I can still hear the hills, valleys, rivers, swamps of it all. It feels good to have this not only as a document for myself, but also as an album to share on its own merits.