February 5, 2025

jamuary 2025 - a postmortem

At the end of 2024, I went down a music gear rabbit hole. It was time, I had decided, to find that one new tool that would spur me back into consistent music-making. For the past year and a half, I had written songs in a halting sort of way, opening up my DAW only when inspiration struck. But that didn’t happen often. Life had — has — been difficult. I had been pulled away from my creative side, pushed into survival mode. But, late last year, I found myself on the other side of all the five-alarm fires, and I still wasn’t making music. But with the right tool…

I opened up ModularGrid, as I had years before, when I bought and then sold a full 7u case, and started planning out my new instrument. Then, I thought, this will be so time-consuming to build, so expensive. I started thinking about singular tools, settling on the SOMA Cosmos, an asynchronous looping station.

It was all so exciting, but also placed a small nugget of dread within me. I’d buy the thing. I’d use the thing. I’d, inevitably, stop using the thing, when the thing’s limitations became apparent. When I learned that the thing was good at one thing, and that wasn’t enough to keep me inspired, to create full songs.1

Ultimately, I closed SOMA’s website and, somewhat impulsively, bought an iPad. I hoped that it would allow me to make things quickly; move files around quickly, for efficient mixing on my computer; and function as a most-in-one solution for ambient music, where I could layer sounds and mangle things without having to hook up a bunch of different instruments or effects boxes. I decided that, with the new year approaching, I’d try to learn my new tool by taking part in Jamuary, where every day is another assignment: make music.

I’m so, so happy with where I ended up. Thirty-one days and 31 pieces of music. Nearly two hours of noise. Drones and jams and ambient delights. Pianos and strings and synths and (digital) tape machines and reverb. For the first time, I completed Jamuary, brandishing my new instrument all the while.

TDLPA · Jamuary 2025

the project, evolved

The goal was to stick to the plan, make music, and learn the iPad. Success! But the routine, by the second week or so, grew into something bigger.

I have written music in the past. I’ve written ambient music, and post-rock music, and quiet music that becomes very loud and angry, and music that sounds like this, and so many library music tracks. All of those songs, as much as they played with genre, were written with a goal in mind. In some of those albums, the music served a concept; in others, it was a distillation of feeling.

I went into those projects knowing I wanted to make something specific. The sound might have evolved over time, but it was always in service of a plan or emotion.

Jamuary was not. Jamuary was music being made because music needed to be made. And that turned into, maybe, the purest distillation of my tastes and habits of anything I’ve created.

The iPad is open-ended. It isn’t opinionated. I chose the plugins I wanted, the sounds I wanted — even if those had a point of view — and made things. I made them quickly, by necessity, and pushed them out into the world with minimal tinkering.

So, as I’ve learned, here is the kind of ambient music I like to make, when I am not starting from a specific emotional trailhead:

Those first two bullet points move me toward something I didn’t know I was interested in. When I listen back to jamuary 11, 2025, with its crushed, apocalyptic shuffle, or jamuary 19, 2025, rearing back and slamming forward like waves crashing into a destroyed beach, or jamuary 13, 2025, which rests uneasily in one place, a tense moment of nothing, I realize that, in my haste to create anything, I found something I want to explore in the future.3

what is next

And now, reinvigorated by my own ability to keep this project humming along for 31 days, I am going to explore it. I am going to do that in two ways:

As They Danced Like Programmed Angels, I have bounced between ambient and post-rock and have flirted with blackgaze. I don’t know what the project is meant to become, though. It’s just been my solo output. I have loud, metal-flecked songs I want to release; now, I have a whole host of ideas from Jamuary that I want to build upon.

I want to start by trying to combine all these sides of myself into some ur-project, where unsettling ambient gives ways to shrieks of noise and distorted guitars and melodic crescendos. Maybe it’ll work, and I can find a way to pull all of my musical digressions into one body. Or maybe it won’t, and these threads will spread out, becoming projects with other names.

Whatever the case may be, my goal is to release this music. What good is it doing, finished, on a hard drive? What good is it doing half-written, tinkered with until it sounds like nothing, a conduit for my own disappointment?

I’m going to release the music. I’m going to finish it and get art created for it and maybe get it professionally mastered, and I’m going to release it. I’m going to promote it quietly and not fall victim to the pressures of so many algorithms. Maybe people will listen to it; likely people won’t. But it will be in the world, and I will have created it. That’s all I need.

  1. My Tasty Chips GR-1 sits sadly in the corner of my room, waiting to be touched…↩︎

  2. Not every day’s a winner.↩︎

  3. Then there’s jamuary 4, 2025, which is just big and mean and reminds me of so much music I’ve made in the past.↩︎

  4. I already did something like that for an album that will release in about a month. I contributed to one song, which has been released. More to come…↩︎


// tags: making music jamuary
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jamuary 31, 2025 - it’s done I did not think I would complete this challenge. Jamuary asks you to build, perform, and release a track every single day. The tracks don’t have to
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let’s start making an album This January, I participated in “jamuary,” a challenge in which a musician tries to make some kind of music every single day. Somehow, I succeeded,