2026:
5.13.26 Practice Journals - 1st Entry
The first of a series of self-released practice sessions recorded over the past three years while developing the performing-as-composing process. Each is improvisational, released with no editing, mixing or mastering, and includes notes on the time of practice, the weather, bodily state and sensations. This series is a way of documenting process and also an attempt to archive that process as it inevitably changes.
2024:
Recorded in three sessions at Mothership Studios in San Francisco, these sessions reflect an ongoing experiment of approaching composing as a conversation with the internal and external conditions of the moment as they shift and change. Though split into tracks for the digital and physical cassette release (Handsmade Collective), each session was continuous improvisation, with a synth and vocals fed through a looping pedal while playing the studio’s piano. There were no predetermined themes, lyrics or concepts in an attempt to stay true to the practice of going to unremarkable street corners in San Francisco and allowing the world of that corner to guide musical choices. The choices made in the studio, being an enclosed and deeply listening space as opposed to the exposure and din of a street corner, produced a much more personal, even difficult to access at times, sound than any of the outdoor urban sessions. These sessions were recorded, mixed and mastered by Danny Bozella at Mothership Studios in San Francisco, Ca.
2022:
Wisdom Facade - Conclusions from Youth
Drawing inspiration from David Lynch films, sci-fi soundtracks, angst driven darkwave and transcendent symphonic composition, Conclusions from Youth is a desire-drunk tightrope walk of dissatisfaction and euphoria cloaked in late city nights, percolated by moments of glow: a neon sign, a halogen streetlamp, a glimpse of stars between the fog drifts. Kevin Balcora and Kaitlin McSweeney employ digital synthesizers, cello, piano and a broad spectrum of sampled audio, from field recordings to pieces of classical orchestral works, as they reflect on growing up in the Bay Area through the turn of the millennium. From the desperate, chant-like cry for a sense of security in “Safe” to the sleep spoken plea for everything to pause in “Stay”, Conclusions from Youth is an archive of yearning in a time and place of rapid and ceaseless change.
2014:
A first attempt at composing, produced and recorded using a broken usb computer microphone, an almost equally broken Line 6 amp, a Korg DS-8, voice memo recordings of appliances and conversations, generated effects on Audacity and vocals. Much of these songs are trying something out on a whim, making a discovery and tugging threads of (sometimes) coherence from there.