VA - Le désespoir utopique (2023)

"Conceptually, Le désespoir utopique came out of the idea of how some people relocate because they're privileged, and others because they are forced to; some can't move because of lack of privilege and others are able to stay put because of privilege (myself included in this last group). I was thinking about the Expulsion of the Acadians, the US evacuation of Afghanistan, folks seeking asylum in Maine, Grapes of Wrath, and how a lot of my own family has left and some of us have stayed. The resulting lyrics are both intensely personal and attempt to examine universal human themes - grief, family, childhood - but they are not commentary about specific historical or current events.

Musically, my primary goal is always to evoke emotion from the listener. On this album, I worked to expand the group's stylistic boundaries with explorations of early European classical music (Renaissance and earlier), "continuous music" (Lubomyr Melnyk), and avant-garde jazz (Alice Coltrane), while incorporating more electronic/synthesized elements drawn from trip-hop and ambient. The resulting music on this album only hints at the aforementioned influences, blending them into our gloomy intersection of neoclassical and folk."