Looked Away in Abandon
There have been many side effects to the pandemic, one of which (for me) is a deliberate return to music. It’s nothing new, I never stopped writing or recording, but music is definitely back with a vengeance—I believe as a more visceral or direct way to process emotions. There’s also a dialog taking place in my mind with the photography work...something I’d touched on in the past but never “clearly”. I’m not exactly fixed on the way it’ll translate (1) and most of it is still kind of blurry, but I sense pieces coming together somehow. As I recently mentioned, my studio setup has changed considerably and is now geared towards mixed media rather than just photography. This isn’t at all by accident.
Last year I launched a new music project called Horse Machine. I won’t rehash the story but let’s just say it was initially meant to be a group/live effort that didn’t pan out. I ended up recording the songs on my own and published the resulting album on this website.
But you know how we get in a rut? How we so easily fall back into working the same way over and over again? How we stop questioning how we do things and just carry on as we always have? With music I had decades of cruft accumulated. And while No Hollow Wave made an attempt at moving elsewhere, I was still using more or less the same methods I’d used for years. In the past six months or so, I’ve broken out. I ditched my Logic templates, started from scratch, opened the user manuals again; I invested in new virtual synths, learned different types of synthesis. I switched the way I mixed and mastered. I purchased new plug-ins, found through magazines and blogs, some from big names and some from small developers.
Basically, I invested time in music again.
The result: Horse Machine is now Horse Machines—the plural form (2)—and there’s a brand new album available on Apple Music, Spotify (3) etc, entitled Looked Away In Abandon.
This particular work isn’t a huge departure: it’s a solo effort that follows in the sonic footsteps of last year’s No Hollow Wave—i.e “rock/alternative” songs. But the project itself will be expanding quite a bit. There’s an electronic EP entitled System of Confined Spaces that’s ready to go, and I’m currently working on more experimental material which will likely be released before the end of the year. I expect the Horse Machines framework to be panoramic in scope, categories be damned. FYI: I’ve removed all music pages from this website while I prepare the full move to streaming platforms and online stores (including the Jade Leary back catalog).
A few words about the images you’re seeing: they were all shot specifically for Looked Away In Abandon, using multiple exposures on the X-Pro3 with the Acros film simulation in-camera. Final processing was done in Capture One. I actually created a different cover for each individual song but unfortunately, it wasn’t possible to distribute the album this way. Ditto for an accompanying PDF booklet.
You can check out the album if you subscribe to any of the streaming services (it should be on Google Play, Amazon, Pandora, iHeartRadio, Tidal and a few others as well). Oh! It’s even available on the iTunes Store…like, to purchase and download and stuff. Time to dust off the iPod ;)
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1. Film maybe?
2. I’d obviously researched the name Horse Machine (no “s”) on the web before starting the project. But I apparently missed a band using that name. They had two songs on a 2006 complication. I kinda like the plural though.
3. Update: removed due to personal ethical reasons.
