Two Perfumes Liner Notes

You Died In My Dream Last Night

YDIMDLN opens with a synthy dream state that takes a jolting turn. I wanted to mirror the escalation of a relationship from casual to something that has stakes to lose, which for me is often signaled when someone starts appearing in my dreams, and begs the question of whether something that feels good can be real.

YDIMDLN is a fully realized iteration a demo I made for a homework assignment in Daniel Lopatin’s School of Song workshop in February 2026. The assignment revolved around crafting “audentity,” and the prompt was to chart the influences, intentions, and implementation methods that were specific to your musical self then make a song uniting them. I never fully honed my manifesto, but I took the prompt as a general exercise in how to communicate my sensibility as a drummer through music that centers the flute.

I came up with this, which has corny sound design and no mix but I thought something about the essence was immediately compelling and worth keeping:

The title “You Died In My Dream Last Night” is adapted from a poem by Heather Christle, My Love You Died In My Dream Last Night.

Two Perfumes

Two Perfumes is an exploration of rituals of excess (like wearing two perfumes) and breaking the fourth wall. I crunched the flute with distortion to invoke signal processing as a form of adornment, which can sometimes feel like disguise (a friend thought the distorted flute was a synth). Two Perfumes “covers” the flute, then gives itself away – a voice sample of me outlining the drum beat before producing it shatters the illusion on purpose – a humbling & humorous transparency of the effort behind effortlessness. Two Perfumes also has a sapphic connotation, obviously, but that was secondary.

The main percussive synth that the song opens with and plays throughout is a resampling of the flute stacks that enter at 0:33, which I recorded myself. I wanted the sense that you get flashes of something before becoming fully enveloped in it.

Intimacy Gradient (Interlude)

The concept of an intimacy gradient is an architectural principle from A Pattern Language that states the spaces in a building should be sequenced from most to least private. I’ve never read A Pattern Language and I know it’s totally overdone in certain spheres yeah yeah okay I’m a poser but a bunch of my friends are architects so I’ve absorbed the concept socially and ambiently on the internet and it feels equally applicable as an interpersonal metaphor as well as the arc of a listening experience. It felt like an appropriate name for an interlude, like a hallway that takes you from one room to the next.

Not Every Seagull is a Seagull

This title is pulled directly from a journal entry of mine recounting a day at Fort Tilden with my childhood best friend, their new crush, and some of their friends:

sun mar 8, 8:48pm, home

first warm day of the year so hopped in A’s subaru and walked the beach almost end to end. J brought two sets of binoculars & i learned that not everything that looks like a seagull is a seagull. we picked up banh mi on the way and while walking another queer approached us and asked to borrow a phone. A offered their portable charger instead and we wound up hanging with this person and sharing our sandwiches with them until their friend (who was also their ex, ofc) showed up and we all hung out for a while. we noticed many thresholds on the beach of stark temperature shifts in the air, like stepping through the veil, and we determined it was because we were walking in and out of clouds (at one point we joked it was angels pissing in the air). the mist was low and the colors were saturated and the sky was stratified in a way i haven’t really seen, a straight blue line below the usual golden hour fare, no gradient. we had a lot of haunted encounters throughout the day with abandoned buildings and the whole group accompanied me (protectively & supportively) while i changed my tampon in a bush. everyone kept remarking that we were having a great day. i was so thirsty the whole time and my mouth got so salty from the mist. the beach was completely empty when we left and the light was hazy and A whispered, “did we die?” the car ride home had a perfect sky. i played hildegard’s jour 1596 and everyone loved it (M identified an FKA twigs sample i never noticed) and C texted me “are you seeing the sky!!”

Kite Scene

Kite Scene started as a demo I made during a blizzard in January 2026, which was a Sunday afternoon that I decided to spend watching the entire 28 Days Later franchise and playing the flute. This demo came together in about an hour, with 3 single-take improvisational flute lines layered on top of a synth loop. I wound up keeping basically the entire composition from those original takes and just beefed up the mix.

This song was also a technical milestone for me because in January I worked through an extremely robust mixing and mastering course (like we’re talking 50+ hours) and this is the first track I ever fully mixed myself to what I considered a release-ready extent.

I owe my relationship to kites to my friend AWS, who gifted me one of theirs after lending it to me for a solo trip to Berlin. I flew it in Tempelhofer at sunset, and it got so high that I could barely see it, but I noticed the wind made a faint whistling sound from the vibrations along the kite string, like an instrument. In that moment I felt very connected to my friend, who feels very connected to the wind, and our shared friends who are my family. I spent a day with said family in March that we jokingly called “demo day,” because we all wound up spontaneously showing each other works-in-progress of various media, and I played this track for them.

P.S. There’s also really good Purelink song called Kite Scene and I went back and forth about whether to change the name but it feels too true, and having an abundance of musical kite scenes in the world is probably a good thing.

Protector

The voice in Protector is a missed call from my mom I got in 2016. In her voice I hear resignation to the fact that I’m the only person who could pull me out of the place I was in, and in the track I feel hypervigilant relief that I chose to.

A sound design hallmark of this EP is applying distortion to the flute, and on Protector I feel like it shines. I felt equally inspired by the guitar solo in Balloons by Jasper van’t Hof (it comes in at 4:29) and frustrated that I don’t play the guitar, so I spent a lot of this EP trying to “guitarify” my flute and give it the same kind of grit as this solo.

My effect rack in Ableton to achieve the distorted flute tone at the end of Protector looks like this (all Ableton stock):

• Overdrive
• Warm Reverb Long
• Echo Fuzz (automated, turns on at the phrase ends)
• Auto-pan Tremolo (automated, turns on at the phrase ends)

In other places on the EP, like in Two Perfumes, I use Multiband Dynamics to control the tone of the distortion, but I didn’t need to do that here.