About Luma

All of the pieces are sourced from improvised demo performances that have been continually refined, edited, expanded, contracted, mixed, remixed, clarified, and generally augmented until the desired result was achieved.

The title of the album was selected for three reasons: (1) I like the appearance of the word; (2) it represents the brightness in an image; (3) it's the name of a village in the Manu'a Islands.

01 - Sketches Of Waves (2:24)
Written while listening to newscasts from the Pacific the day of the Chilean earthquake tsunami. Features a sample of KSBS FM Pago Pago.

02 - Oceanic (5:30)
For many years I've equated the sea and crowds. The myriad diamond-topped wavelets moving in seeming chaos on the surface of the ocean remind me of the apparent chaos while lost in a crowd. The wave go a thousand different directions, while in crowds a thousand conversations and people move with different motivations, yet a crowd has a driving current and purpose that guides it the same way the deep currents that ultimately move the sea.

03 - Memories Of Sunlight (9:21)
The first of several tracks inspired by '70s synth masters like Vangelis and Tangerine Dream.

04 - Aquamarinblau Mellotron (4:52)
If an instrument's sound could be represented as a color, the Mellotron is blue-green for me. This impression can be traced back to my youth when I'd listen to my favorite vinyl albums that heavily featured Mellotron and stare at the album covers. The green and/or bluish cover art of Tangerine Dream's "Phaedra" and "Rubycon", Yes' "Close To The Edge", and Edgar Froese's "Aqua" and "Epsilon in Malaysian Pale" doubtlessly informed this notion. Written after my first viewing of Andrei Tarkovsky's "Solaris". The sea of Solaris seemed to demand a Mellotron.

05 - Deep-sky Object (8:54)
Another piece that owes much to the analog synth heroes of my youth.

06 - Avenues And Gardens Leading To The Sea (6:33)
I imagined India during the British Raj, and in it a city of cinnamon sunsets with manicured English gardens framing dusty streets filled with the poor. All of the roads and people were flowing forward inevitably like the Ganges to the Indian Ocean.

07 - A Topography Of Light (9:25)
Slight remix of the soundtrack for the video.

08 - Amplified Void (6:50)
While watching David Sylvian's documentary "Amplified Gesture" I found myself fascinated by the speaking voice of John Tilbury. Specifically, I was distracted by the sounds Tilbury made between words. I sampled a few moments of Tilbury and then removed his words leaving only the spaces. Within this space I constructed the somewhat industrial soundscape presented here.

09 - A Flight Of Winter Birds (5:23)
The result of composing deep in the miserable wound of winter, working on electric piano and Prophet V on a chill gray Sunday.

10 - Music From An Empty Room (Hallucinogenic Afternoon) (16:29)
A sibling to my other Ofu Island field recording-based soundscape pieces from the past several years. This recording was made on a quiet afternoon in my room at Vaoto Lodge when I found myself wondering what empty spaces do to entertain themselves when no one is around. I set up my recorder and left the room to discover the answer to that question. After a person leaves a room I imagined the very air itself morphing slightly into a consciousness that hums and interfaces with outside sounds. Philosophizing aside, a tree falling in a forest makes a sound with or without human ears there to hear it, and a room is not a dead silent space when left alone.