Icaromancer

Coming October 4th

My new album, Icaromancer, is an album of icaro-style songs, inspired by the music of Colombian yagé and Peruvian Shipibo ayahuasca ceremonies, as well as Iboga rituals from the Bwiti and Fang tribes of Africa. The music carries those traditions inside it, but what comes out through me is something different—my own lo-fi, mid-talent, raw way of honoring those sounds. Filtering them through my life, my experiences, my madness, and my ears as an American psychedelic person who has never lived a tribal life, but a crazy life during crazy times, in an insane region amongst tons of questionable humans. Trying to live and express life as it unfolds.

These pieces are like artifacts. I am not presenting these as Icarosian guidance themselves. In fact, you probably don't want to use them for that. They are more like broken mirrors found in an abandon building. Sometimes, presenting uncomfortable truths or hidden fractures within the matrix. Sometimes, kalidoscopic diamond fractalization patterns on the wood floor. They are what happens when someone like me listens closely, takes in those ceremonies, and lets them echo out in a raw, personal, field-recorded style. Things run through the mill.

Most of the songs are built around acoustic guitar, piano, harmonica, accordion, organ, shakers, and simple percussion. They're almost all instrumental, except for one or two spoken-word moments. They came to life in real places: on a porch, in a hallway, outside in the woods while camping, around a fire, during quiet and emotional times alone at home, and sometimes in the middle of deep psychedelic moments that I wanted to capture for posterity. Almost everything was recorded live and fresh, then later brought into Logic where I added a few extra parts, adjusted some settings, and nudged them into final form. The hiss of tape, the shifting of a microphone, the natural patina of lo-fi—all of that is part of the truth of the music.

This is close-to-the-heart music. Simple riffs and melodies that I tried to play honestly, as momentary guides. I think of them as letters from an unknown, uncontacted tribe that happens to be me. I am using these riffs to say what I cannot otherwise say. I am being vulnerable and intimate here in a way I want people to know me. I want to show myself, not explain. I want to communicate in the way shamans communicate in the jungle: with music as language, music as guidance. That is something we don't focus on as much in the West, where music has become something you turn on in the background for pleasure or escape. Many of us, though, take music much more seriously. I use it to communicate parts of myself that I cannot express in any other way. Which, for me, seems vital for my existence.

I often work in sequels or in trilogies, making sense of the different genres I move through by linking them. Maybe, building upon the existing epicness of the narrative and keeping certain characters in the game. Like, sometimes two albums of the same ilk emerge, and I treat them as original and a sequel. Icaromancer is one of those sequels. It follows my 2012 release Sekdek – Below Me, which was one hundred percent influenced by the ayahuasca circles I was participating in at the time. That record was about DMT and its effects on me. The music there more closely resembled what I had imagined during actual ceremonies and trips. It was my own take on icaros, but with a modernized, more overtly psychedelic and experimental sound—an attempt to capture those experiences more accurately than the cultural shorthand we usually lean on.

I think about it in the context of how cinema has evolved. Early psychedelic portrayals, such as the light tunnels in 2001: A Space Odyssey, remain powerful, albeit limited. Today, modern effects can bring a psychedelic experience to the screen in ways that feel closer to the impossibility of what we see. I've always felt that visionary art—liquid projector shows, stock mandalas, fractal imagery—gets stuck in a one-dimensional pattern. As if awe struck inside the impossible doorway, forgetting to continue through it. It repeats a limited vocabulary of what "psychedelic" looks like, as if that's the only way to show the beyond. My work, both visual and musical, pushes against that naturally. I press the gas on strangeness and uncanny oddity, because that feels truer to the psychedelic experience. It's not all romantic or idealized rainbows and unicorns. Sometimes, there is otherworldly impossibility, strangeness, wonder, and awe. Sometimes angelic, occasionally difficult. But always real and unreal. Always something substantial is happening.

That's what I wanted Below Me to capture, and what Icaromancer now continues to reference, but from an outside point of view. From the campfire on earth, not trying to see through the portal's eyeball. Simplistic human language hello tracks put in a time box and sent to space for whatever to find whenever. My translations are personal signatures, quirky show-and-tell, short songs that stand as cartoon artifacts of bigger journeys. Acoustic outlier sketch.

I've always been a multi-genre artist, and maybe that's my strength. I don't belong to any one box. I explore how different genres emerge through me and how I can document them. This time it came out as icaro-inspired music, but it is still me—my curiosity, my sense of sound, my need to record life as it passes. I love field recordings. Constantly capturing, always documenting. I live as a recording artist. Icaromancer is just one arc in that process, a journey in itself, a collection of intimate recordings caught over decades, that flow together into something bigger.

I've been working on many albums over the years, and for whatever reason, many come to completion around the same time. I release in bursts, in bulk, outside of any normal cycle or pattern. That's just how I roll. I need to get the music out so I can move on to the next thing. This album belongs to that moment of release, of letting go, like how the Burning Man people say.

The arc of Icaromancer takes the listener through a journey of closeness and space. The music is intimate, sometimes reminding me of the tenderness and vulnerability of a Chet Baker ballad, but at the same time, it carries the ceremonial call-outs of the shamans. Simple riffs, played honestly, with a lo-fi patina that makes them breathe like living artifacts.

Artists I look to in this realm include the great Shipibo icaro singers like Guillermo Arévalo, ayahuasca healers from Pablo Amaringo's circle, and interpreters like Tito La Rosa, Mamer, and Luzmila Carpio. In the broader field of psychedelic folk, there are echoes of Moondog, Terry Riley, Gavin Bryars, Robbie Basho, Popol Vuh, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Six Organs of Admittance, and Natural Snow Buildings. Like them, I take music seriously—as medicine, as spirit, as truth. And sometimes not that seriously at all, and just to let it ride. Comfortable with duality.

John Coltrane once said, "just want to be as sincere as I can." That's the energy I tried to capture in this album. Every song is sincere. Every riff is a letter from the inside. Icaromancer is about presence and showing sides of myself I can't show in any other way, and letting those sides exist in sound.