“AEGIS” is my longest format of work yet, a 65-minute journey into music I’ve written over this past year. Originals, remixes, edits, bootlegs, collaborations. All types of music, some emotive, some heavy. Some thoughtful, some more impulsive.

Sometimes it’s easier to just forget about the whole artistic cycle, where you just continuously eat your own tail. You allow the machine to take over. It’s easy to do the same trick over and over again. Court jesters are rewarded handsomely. On the other hand, it’s difficult to push the envelope. There are no prizes for it. It’s painful to constantly reinvent yourself… and yet, we resist, still. Better for the soul.

Sonic identity is such a remarkably interesting phenomenon. Something that people can latch onto, immediately identify and then categorize. A genre, or even one particular type of phrasing. A specific synth. A key. Whatever it is. A lot of times, it’s a specific song, a “hit”, if you will, that defines the artist for the rest of their career. Usually, a 3-4 minute (or now 15 second - 2 minute, with ever-decreasing attention spans) little arrangement of sounds that apparently define you. Don’t get me wrong, bangers are always fun. Lots of those in here. But what I’m most interested in is the bigger picture. The whole package. The artist themselves and what more they’ll create … the intelligent, the dumb, the vibrant, the gritty, the pretty, the ugly. Whatever it is. I’m most interested in the duality. That’s why I like the greys the most. Stuff that’s harder to define, that’s not quite yin, not quite yang, but definitely both. That’s where I wanna live - in the greys, the harder to define. Even now it’s hard to articulate what I’m trying to describe. I’m not the best wordsmith, but hey, that’s why we write the music anyways, right?

I don’t really know what the answers are, ultimately. But all I know is that I want to keep going, to keep treating what I do know about music and my own taste as this living, breathing document. And so, I’ve decided to be a little more vulnerable. A place where I can be little more okay with things not sounding perfect, or a mixdown being a little messier than usual, or letting myself write whatever genre without fear of it being “not good enough”. I can hide behind a shield (an aegis) by calling it a showcase, mixtape format, instead. Songs that might come out, songs that will never come out. Fuck it.

Please enjoy!

- Eric