short: old midi compositions repurposed and collaged on bad tape, played with a distinctive shoebox recorder and then taken back to the digital realm.

long: i started writing music when i was 11 or 12, using a little piece of free software called finale notepad. if you use notepad, the most immediately obvious thing about it is the quality of its soundfonts. the one labeled "violin" sounds like a toy horn, the "guitar" like a harpsichord, the percussion defying useful reference points entirely. if you don't know what you're doing, the compositions notepad's eight audio channels spit out sound like flat, robotic midi barf.

the source material of this ep is music from when i didn't know what i was doing. from 2012 to 2015 i made hundreds of compositions in this software, most of them unfinished. most of them will never see the light of day, but a few of them appear here in fragments. the source material of "scattering starlight" is most recent; that of "the hollow" — the third song i ever wrote — is the oldest. i sourced everything except "silverfish" from these midi compositions.

most people are content to let their old embarrassing midi flounderings rot in a tiny folder buried deep within their computer, i'd imagine, but in august of 2019 i realized i had alternate plans for mine. people usually accuse midi of coldness, lifelessness, and predictability, and laud tape for its warmth, energy, and versatility, so i thought i might revitalize these unmistakably digital pieces with some analog randomness. to that end, i got some decades-old cassettes from my grandparents. i unspooled their tape. i wrapped the tape around hairbrushes. i flossed with it. i let my friend's cat play with it. when i took the little shoebox recorder — a radioshack ctr-120 — and ran its mono headphone out into my interface, there were multiple times where i thought it would just give up on me altogether. it didn't help that i was abusing the recorder, too, holding down "pause" and "play" at the same time, rewinding twisted tape to get more inches of flutter, running things way too hot. after recording five hours' worth of material like this, the recorder really did give up on me, but i pried it open with a screwdriver, fixed it, and recorded some more. the material here that isn't sourced from tape is sourced from incidental sounds the tape recorder made, the sounds of it squawking and wheezing and almost dying from overexertion.

after all that, i had way too many ideas to edit down. i got stuck for more than half a year, until february. the project was on my mind often, but i didn't know where to take it. the problem was that things needed more of a sense of direction. fortunately, the passage of time gave me one. as with any project that interrogates/exploits a particular recording medium's idiosyncrasies, this one became about memory. my headspace when i composed those original midi pieces was radically different from my headspace when i buried them, and my headspace when i excavated them even more different still. trying to reconcile the subjectivity of these memories helped give me a narrative, one where things slowly fall apart and come back different.

to that end, i used my computer to collage things back together as i saw fit. aside from some slight pitch alterations, stereoization, and a bit of compression and equalization, that's the only post-production i did. some of these pieces went back to tape after their final masters, but more did not. i wanted the analog and digital sides of aphasia lovechild to stay in dialogue with each other, even as they were smashed up and reconfigured. the audio glitches you hear give everything some digital randomness, which i transferred back to tape for analog predictability.

overall, i want you to see this ep as something that blurs the distinction between analog and digital production — between then and now — and makes you question the ways in which your past informs your present.

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i wanted to thank caden mcmahan for giving me the radioshack ctr-120 i used to record everything initially, and nakiya bradshaw for the boombox i taped some of the songs back onto. you two both helped make the production cost of this ep less than $10, and that has to count for something.