I made some music
I hope you like pianos
For the past several years, mostly on Sundays, I’ve been writing music. One of my goals for 2023 was to put some of this music in the form of an album. I’ve now done that and you can listen to it on Spotify here. If you want, you can buy it on Bandcamp for £7 / $10 and support me in making more music like this.
The album is called Boundless, Immaculate and I’m releasing it under the moniker Larkdown. Larkdown is the name of the street where me and my friend used to make music as teenagers. That same friend, Patch, is now a professional music producer and produced this album.
The music is instrumental and centred around the piano, but there are lots of warm synths, field recordings and occasionally drums and guitar. You might like it if you’re a fan of Ólafur Arnalds, Jon Hopkins, Sigur Rós or Nils Frahm. Some lesser-known artists that inspired me a lot are Henrik Lindstrand, John Hayes, Poppy Ackroyd and Masakatsu Takagi. You can listen a bunch of songs and artists that inspired me here.
The album is loosely inspired by and seeks to express (if very vaguely) the concept of existential hope; the idea that the future could not only be there for us, but that it could be full of riches and wonders that we can’t comprehend. These pieces are trying to tap into the plentiful warmth that our futures could be full of if all goes well. I’ve written more words about deep, existential hope here.
The names of the songs in the album are a poem. It’s about looking beyond the confines of our mortality and imagination and feeling something much bigger:
Lie Back
Look Beyond
The Fragile Sun
The Empty Sky
And Breathe In
Boundless, Immaculate
Hope
In the same theme, the final song, Hope, features a chopped up quote from Toby Ord (from his book The Precipice):
Life can offer something far grander and more alive.
Brush off more and more dust
And make a home amidst the beauty of the world.
I’m really proud of this music. When I was a teenager, I also wrote lots of music (largely indie folk, which had it’s heyday in the early 2010s). I feel embarrassed to share that music now because I put so many teenage feelings on display that now feel naive or shallow but fuck it: here it is.
I wanted to become a musician, but then I started reading about philosophy and the horrors of the world and realised I ought to and wanted to focus on helping others instead.
However, I knew that if I entirely gave up on making music, I would be passing up something that feels core to what it means to be me. So, I’m going to try and have a career in music in slow motion instead. Creating music at a pace that means I can mostly focus on more altruistic work. So, here’s one album which took me somewhere between 2 and 4 years to make.
I hope you enjoy it. Please do let me know if you do, and if it makes you feel things, that would mean a lot to me.