Against All Trappings, Staring Into The Cavernous Sea has been out for seven months now. My new collection We Are, Or Were, Here has been out since December 14. The essay is on the projects page here… https://samuelshook.com/2026/01/21/we-are-or-were-here/
We Are Or Were Here is inspired by the various aspects of nature beginning with direction and moving toward otherness. It works with the instruments I had available and field recordings sourced from various places. My hope, is that some will take the time to listen to it in one sitting to get the full effect of the movements between pieces. It is through-composed and combines various influences and styles to create a heterogeneous sound. Here is a track list…
Toward A Liberatory Symbiotic Ecology
Mycorrhizal Network
Soil
Moss Spores
To Be A Lichen
Dew
Underwater
Unconscious Vocabulary
Urban Food Forestry
Scape 7
Traffic Patterns
Otherness
I like to leave room for interpretation, letting the listener have a personal experience. Yet, I am indebted to the authors that I read at the time. Among the most prominent are Immanuel Levinas, particularly the essays On Escape, Existence and Existents, Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being; Murray Bookchin’s The Ecology of Freedom and The Philosophy of Social Ecology; William James’s Pragmatism and Stanley Cavell’s A Pitch of Philosophy created lenses from which to analyze, question, represent, and provide a space to consider these concentrations of life. The essay accompanying the collection develops these encounters.
Many of these essays and books helped me through my mental health struggles at the time. They provided a grounding of sorts to be disciplined with my daily coping skills. I learned much in the ways of prioritizing senses and cycling through struggling moments, to rest, breathe, and be present with my environment instead of troubled by some memory, delusion, or hallucination. However, along with such reading came the stress of challenging thoughts.
Working through these sounds provided a space wherein I could look inward to process the conflict in the world, mine and others. The amount of grief that I perceived in the world around me resonated with me through the collection and influenced the movement of events. In effect, working on this collection was much akin to the tides, the creativity would rise and fall through the weeks and hydrate the shores of my recording room.
A significant part of my process with these collections is to accept imperfection. I strive to keep a natural feel and sound to the album. Field recordings are maintained as they fall within the structure of the sounds by chance of where each event aligns from the beginning of its entrance. Improvisation utilizing instruments not in there tonal hierarchical form, but chance placement within a scale without resolve applies an intuitive process to these pieces creation. That is not to say every piece is accomplished in one take. The improvisations develop into a more authentic character to complete the whole with the input of emotions or the lack thereof and the mindset of the day. Interestingly, my ear leads to tonality even when I aspire to go away from it methodically.
As of now, I have been very inspired by spaces, absences, lack, or nothingness. The work following We Are Or Were Here will involve looking at the recovery process, its cyclical nature in mental health, and the variability within those cycles by which they can be overcome through being present, or living and accepting imperfection as a process of authenticity. Much of the inspiration of this work comes from Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, the words of Socrates, and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Circle’s. More on that later.
It may be enduring to end with some quote that sums up the emotional intuition, grand vein of consciousness, or leave you feeling that all is nought if not but speckled by beauty. However, in the spirit of leaving and seeing things for what they are and such that language confines only to elaborate as best it can, I will simply say….Thank you and Goodbye.