Recorded 2020-2024. Available on streaming 05-22-2025

“Against All Trappings, Staring Into The Cavernous Sea is a gallery of scenes and items that all take place in the realm of Ashland. Ashland is where some go after death to be with their fate or Tel. As such, these Tel are winged humanoids. They have black eyes, and their wings can fuse with their bodies to look like they are embroidered with tattoos. One such Tel is Meadow, and she is the fate of the human Artemis. They are the characters within these stories. 

Within each of these moments is a recognition of our mortality, our imperfection, and our perseverance in striving to overcome our differences within ourselves, each other, and the world. Some questions considered are how pain is seen as a friend to the world in what we do—the consumption, the self-discipline, the unsettling fear of authenticity, and the depression formed by allowing others to create the forms by which we live. There is an attentive focus on the natural setting within which lives exist. In the field recordings, you may hear the occasional power line, oil well, car, or other human industries. This is not my intention, but only a sign of humans’ impact on our environment and a representation of those unheard voices outside of the human purview with a focus on being in the here and now. I have strived for a recurring embrace of our human imperfection. Throughout Artemis’s journey with Meadow, they come to terms with themselves and their humanity. It is that by leaving the human in, there will be a presence of acceptance. An acceptance within Artemis of their own depression formed out of years of abuse within the Earth environment. Of course, I can’t escape earth so I relate this in earthly terms. Therefore, it also applies to what we do on earth—daily recovering from daily trauma, the absence of a presence such as Meadow’s for ourselves, others, and the world. As the title suggests and in response to Emerson’s The Over-Soul we have to cast aside our trappings, be against them, liberate, and recognize, stare into the cavernous sea; the eroded spaces from the forces within our lives. That to give up is sometimes to keep going downward into the cavernous seas, controlling our lives through abuse, ignorance, oppression, and violence. The very void created by suffering and oppression is answered through these tracks incompletely by my imperfections as a composer and songwriter. The intention is to create a space for thinking about a world created by support for each-other, healing from pain, that is not to deny that pain is natural, but that solidarity in experience knowing there is opportunity for change and a better life beyond the ecological tensions turning the end of life into one of loneliness, misunderstanding, and loss.

Music holds the interpretable. Thus, this is my interpretation and intention—what held my focus.” – Samuel