In this post, I'll be providing some additional insight and answer some questions I've received about the production of my latest EP, BIOMES. This post can serve as a living document, and I'll add to it over time with additional answers if I get more questions. I had a lot of fun making BIOMES and exploring different ways of working than I had used before. All 6 of the tracks on the project have demo versions that were released on my Jamuary 2025 Mixtape.
Each of these tracks started as short exploratory sketches that were made in 2025 in a single sitting during the creative endurance run that is Jamuary. I'm always super inspired during the month of January because of the sheer amount of new ideas that I get to hear from other artists every day. I've also been incredibly privileged to serve as the MC for Seed to Stage's version 'Jamnuary' for the last 4 years - which puts me in close proximity to a huge number of amazingly talented and creative people working alongside me for the month. It's hard not to stay stoked and inspired everyday when people of all experience levels are learning and experimenting and sharing the new daily work that they're excited about.
Endurance and Time
Despite the excitement, the event is an endurance run nonetheless. This year, I managed to go for 41 consecutive days, dropping a new outline for a song idea every day. The spirit of Jamuary is to 'do what you can' each day. I think plenty of participants are more than satisfied to casually experiment, find a thread they'd like to return to pulling later and call it a day. For the first few years that I participated, I was definitely in this camp of people who was thrilled to consistently come up with a new 8 or 16 bar loop each day.
However, for the past couple years, I've made it my mission to create the outline of a full track each day. For me, I've learned that completing a minimum of an A and B section for each jam means that I'm not only more likely to return to the idea, I'm more likely to take the idea to the finish line - which has been a big part of my 'secret' to releasing new tracks a few times this year.
Writing Without Drums
As you can imagine, my energy level dips some days just as anyone's would. Fun or not, sustained effort in creativity is sustained mental effort and friction. And over a long period of time, it's draining coming up with a torrent of new ideas every day. I tried my best to never 'phone it in' while working through those 41 days. But some of my compositional decisions definitely reflected that I had less available time some days than others. All 6 of BIOMES tracks started on days like this - which is why even the demo versions don't contain any drums. It was a conscious decision on each of those days to try and compose without them. Drums tend to be one of the biggest time sinks for me. For me, a good drum part cries out for an interlocking bass and before I know it, I can spend a full days time just building those up and finding a chord progression I like.
Without drums, my writing process changes significantly. Without a rhythmic anchor point, I typically tend to reach for a chorded instrument first. Then, I start feeling out a combination of chords and texture that act as a solid bedrock to start building on top of. The 'setting' often feels a little more tangible with environmental foley as well. With those two elements present, I think it's easy to hear where the song wants to go. This is not just because the setting feels clarified, but because the spectrum is already partially filled. If the mission is just to 'fit' a simple bass and arpeggio into the existing mix, there is already a reasonably tangible 'slot' to fit that element in the sonic spectrum.
Writing without drums also made it clear to me how central they are to the majority of mixes. They're very often an anchor point for music of all kinds. Beyond composition, it's easy to agonize over their tonality and presence in the mix. Modern popular music actively pulls other elements out of their way with sidechaining. And so the absence of drums in the mix makes it feel like there is this big, clean sonic space to decorate. Voices have room to be bigger and more distinct when they might otherwise need to be more reserved to accommodate the drums.
Imaginary Spaces
When I write, I like to think of an imaginary space I'm creating. As an instrumental musician, the thing I'm trying to communicate without lyrics is inherently arcane and intangible. The thing that gives me direction a lot of the time is the pursuit of a 'setting'. I like to imagine that I'm the composer for a video game, and each track is a level. I enjoy thinking of my task as being to suggest a space and mood together. Anyone who has played a game with a great soundtrack knows that when a visual setting and a musical mood are served together, it can serve as the backdrop to make moments in the experience so much more magical and memorable.
Since I'm just working with audio, one of the most powerful tools to use instead of visuals is foley sounds and environmental audio. The sounds of nature can serve a similar role to drums as an anchor point in the writing process. Gently rolling waves, a breeze or the sound of crickets call for the sounds around them to be gentle. While others like a thunderclap or revving engine might announce an explosive takeoff. It doesn't require a lot of imagination to use these kinds of sounds in a very literal way to announce to the listener where the song is taking place. I'm of the mind that this 'layer' of sound design giving a very practical and non-interpretive representation of a space is a nail that warrant hitting on the head often enough.
This is something that I tend to think about often enough - is this a space that is grounded in reality, or a place that is more purely fictional? BIOMES is very grounded for the first two thirds. The spaces I'm trying to suggest are ones that can be experienced in the real world - rolling desert dunes, beach campfires, a boat in the middle of the ocean, or the shallows of a reef. It is when we descend to a space that I have to imagine up and invent that the spacial part of sound design becomes more experimental and psychedelic. I've never been to the Mariana trench, or flown through the ionosphere - so the spatial part of the sound design later in the EP becomes less practical and more imagined and interpretive.
