Nocturnal Signal Release Notes

This album is a collection of songs I’ve been working on for a long time. I started putting them together after moving to a house in the forest. Living in the trees brought out an appreciation for the forest’s sonic landscape that I had not experienced before. There’s a trail I walk on straight out the front door that I enjoy multiple times a week throughout the year. Spending this much time on one trail, you recognize a whole new set of happenings: the newly fallen trees, the chaotic wreckage after a windstorm, the nook where the wood peckers like to hang out, the ferns unraveling, the new saplings growing out of an old snag. You feel the forest’s life and death flowing into itself, accompanied by the inescapable changes that go with it, each turn and twist imprinted in memory. Visuals and sounds from hundreds of hikes are mixed up in the new experience that the trail has become. The forest sounds bubble up: footsteps crunching on the trail, cedar branches snapping under foot, ferns rustling nearby, moss whispering under hand, wind swaying the trees. All participate together in a quiet symphony. The sound of the leaves under my feet are different in the fall, winter, spring, and summer. How did I miss this? I wanted these sounds to become my music so I picked up a field recorder and got to work.

Most of the songs on Nocturnal Signal were written at night. The title track was written in a dream I had a number of years ago. Oddly enough, in the dream I was playing the melody on a trumpet, an instrument I’ve never played before. When I woke up I picked up my guitar and worked out the melody. I’ve re-used both the melody and chord progression in different songs and in different ways a number of times and will likely continue to do so; the structure is durable in different musical forms.

This release is the sound of me finding my musical identity in electronic music using field recordings and sound design. I went wide, trying a number of different techniques but ended up settling in on a couple approaches that worked best for my craft. On my next release I will be going deep with one set of field recordings taken after a large snow storm we had in Bellingham in early March of 2019 and a couple homemade sample-based instruments.

This album is one part of three. The other two parts are a solo acoustic guitar album that draws more on jazz and classical and an album where the sound design and field recordings lead the way. Nocturnal Signal mixes those two sides of inspiration into one sonic mosaic.

Enjoy.

Release Notes:

All songs written, recorded, and mixed by Jeads.

Special thanks to Robin Hiersche for providing the field recordings of whale songs used on Ocean Gray.

Mastered by Taylor Dupree at 12k.

Graphic design by Aleksandar Veselić and Dragana Veselić.