“Temporary Places” is a musical conjuring of impressionistic landscapes that serve as an antidote to the loss of mobility, both mentally and physically. It seeks to open an access point to the enchantment of the natural and inner world. It was initially created as a study in memory. Using personal field recordings and sound design, I was attempting to conjure an audible portal to an emotional recollection of my youth. I imagined colossal wind chimes clapping together, swarming my daydreams on the front porch, a storm rolling in, a neighbor revving her Harley from across the street, a shiny black ant crawling across my mother’s gardening glove. But a conversation I had with my father, incarcerated in a state penitentiary, changed the intention of that portal and its potential journeyers. He had expressed sorrow about being detached from the outside world—of not touching a tree or feeling the rain in years. Simultaneously, a family friend lay bedridden, recently paralyzed from a tragic fall. I wanted a way to deliver, in assisted musical reverie, a heightened version of the natural world to them and anyone who finds themselves quarantined from enchantment. Whether trapped in cell, a bed, or imprisoned by the stresses of contemporary human constructs, these are Temporary Places that can blossom within the listener. Places in which to imagine, play, and be still.

These tracks have been meticulously stitched together from field recordings and studio creations. The field recordings are from the grassy streams of Tam Cốc-Bích Động and moaning jungles of Cúc Phương National Park in Vietnam; the hissing of the summer lawns of Arona, PA; the raining, rocky shores of Castro Canyon and Big Sur, CA; the echoing basement halls of the Pasadena Presbyterian Church, Pasadena, CA; and dozens of areas throughout the San Gabriel Mountains. The studio sounds are made from dry desert wood, clay pots, jugs of water, dismantled organ flutes, gravel, rustling honeysuckle branches, rusty buckets, creaky chairs and lots of bells.