This is an extension of writing I originally published on Bandcamp and in a personal newsletter in August 2025
I was mostly a drummer until developing severe tinnitus in 2023 and shea on air emerged when I left the band scene to protect my ears & reckoned with how to make music alone. I started playing classical flute at 8 years old but haven’t played much since high school. Now I’m left to build a world around it.
First Birthday is my debut EP and I made the whole thing alone in my studio apartment with a 2-octave midi controller and my 1958 Gemeinhardt flute. Its making punctuated a rocky and dynamic period of my life that unfolded in this order: psychiatric trauma, a near-death experience, sudden onset tinnitus, and a period of profound neuroplastic change in myself (6 months of exposure therapy, tinnitus habituation, and a profound psychedelic experience). The extent of the cognitive shift I experienced felt like I had generated a whole new brain, and I joked when turning 29 that it was my first birthday.
I now lean on ambient music to prioritize noise safety at live shows and mask the daily ringing in my ears and my grand dream for shea on air feels descendant from those influences yet laced with a kind of feverish urge to throw my body around behind a drum set. This EP is a nascent gesture toward that vision.
Growing up in rock bands will always be core to my spirit but this project has helped me process the loss of embodying it & psychologically recover from the change in my hearing. Drumming in community is so straightforwardly cathartic; now that feeling is elusive & I long for it. Strangely I’m relieved by the pursuit to recreate it. Playing the flute & drums was always such a freak combo anyway but it’s part of my charm. Maybe the flute rocks the hardest.
Enjoy and wear earplugs xo
Fairy Frequency
“Fairy frequency” is a euphemism I use for my tinnitus, and the beauty of the track is a delusion. It was born out of a demo I made using harmonic effects on my vocal processor.
Fairy Frequency demo on the vocal processor, 5-13-2025
Crush Bait
Crush Bait isn’t so much about crushes as it is about renewed optimism for the abundance of connection of all kinds and being reminded of my agency to pursue them. All the voice samples are from real moments in my life with my friends (but I’ve also heard that Crush Bait works as its name…)
I’m extra proud of Crush Bait (it’s my favorite on the EP) and it actually got radio play on NTS in a segment of supporter submissions. It was the first song played in the very first edition of the segment, despite like, a zillion people submitting stuff in a chaotic discord chat, so I thought that was cool.
Putter
Putter is the most wholesome song on the EP and came together the fastest. Every song I make has to pass the “twirl test,” which is how I refer to the process of playing it back on the speakers in my studio apartment while I make a snack in the kitchen and see if it makes me want to move my body. So Putter is the domestic anthem on the EP, for puttering around the house, and is a celebration of finding routines in a new home. It was originally called “Festival of [name of my street]”, which is a term of endearment my friend Austin coined for any time we hang at my apartment, but that’s kind of doxing myself, so Putter is an alias.
First Birthday
This is the first song on the EP that I made and was the true breakthrough toward finding my musical point of view. Something I was working through was how I could possibly convey the pain I felt within the emotional scope of the flute – the end of this song is truly a wail, and the sound design around it felt like a successful integration of my identity as a drummer. I was kind of like, oh, this is the project right here. This is the seed of everything I’m trying to emotionally accomplish in my weird set of sonic constraints as a flutist who used to play the drums, and longs to recreate the emotional force of drumming with a truly antithetical instrument.
The sample at the very end is from a rehearsal with the band I played in from 2022-2024. It’s there because I wanted to drum on the EP.
