A list of October shows I blab at you for a bit:

October 20 @ 7:00 P.M., Murder by Modulation Hosted by the New York Modular Society

Trans-Pecos 915 Wyckoff Ave, Queens

October 31 @ 8:00 P.M., Halloween Show At Mayday, 93 Manton Ave, Providence

I am a bit shocked. This is the sixth year I have released The October Country and I have just had the uncanny experience of listening to the entire thing. For someone who has been making electronic music in some form for nearly two decades, it’s bizarre how much has changed from year to year. This project has always been my self-indulgent little time capsule and it has honestly capture so much progress that I am ashamed to imagine what it’s going to look like next year.

I figure with this returning again, it might be worth going over how it works, why it exists, and what’s going to happen to it.

For those of you who aren’t familiar the October Counter appears every October and disappears on November 1. There are a number of reasons for this, from the crass to the deeply personal. In terms of crass commercialism, I like having a new album out every year during the time when people are looking for horror-movie music. However, the significance of this pretty minimal. This is a Bandcamp exclusive album and it’s never really gotten me any press. Instead, it’s more about what October means to me.

A bit of biography: I was born in Salem, Massachusetts and lived there until age 8. It was a strange place to be a child, especially given that I have never lived there as an adult. The entire month of October was and is an insane time. I would be walking home from school and see people dressed in Halloween costumes every day, there were dozens of haunted houses with flashing lights and frightening noises emerging from within. It is a tourist town that generates a lot of income in October, especially on Halloween, but to me, all this gave the holiday and that time of year outsized importance.

I was born on the 11^th of October, which overlapped with my other feelings of wonder and excitement at the general pageantry and pseudo mysticism. I remember watching Omri Katz biking around the Salem Commons, (not more than a thousand feet from my house) during the filming of Hocus Pocus and being mesmerized that something I directly witnessed became part of the world of film.

When my family relocated to a speck of a town in rural New Hampshire, I guess we must have still had the bug, because we always hosted big Halloween parties. My parents had decided to be farmers* and so we had skeletons resting on bales of hay, dozens of pumpkins and crates of apple cider. It was like the cover of every YA horror book from the 90s.

This time of year remains important. I have very severe seasonal affective disorder and often struggle through the winter. The fall remains this special time of beauty before things fall away and die. Summer has its own charms and stresses, but Autumn is a uniquely perfect time for me. I think, when you extract all the nostalgia and mysticism, what you’re left with is a time when people allow themselves to contemplate death and, by extension, the unreal, fake elements of life. We give ourselves permission to become something other than our fixed identities and to participate in unreality, in tackiness, in things that frighten us.

The October Country is, I suppose, born out of the same mental shift. It’s not necessarily different from dressing up for halloween. These are not my songs, but these are part of an ever-growing playlist in my head this time of year. You can hear them as I hear them, or heard them, as that part keeps changing.

This year, I recorded a cover of Forging the Beast from Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy.  Given the absurdity of the weather—the extreme heat, hurricanes and tornados in New England this September, I hasn’t felt much like fall until very recently. To me it conjured the mood of Mandy and the manic aggression of tracks like Forging the Beast.

As autumn began to set in, and my family entered into another kind of survival mode (my partner recently lost their job unexpectedly in a very cruel way), I found a certain peace returning to the first track I ever recorded for this: the theme for Suspiria. I met Claudio Simonetti last year and it is almost indescribable how surreal that moment was. He was really affable and actually seemed interested in all my obscure questions about the specifics of various recordings. Just one gem I picked up from our chat: The vocoder on the soundtrack to Tenebrae was actually an EMS Vocoder 3000. Anyway, I rushed that recording/mixing out during a week in late October 2018, and if possible made the situation worse with a remix in 2019, which has sat unaltered for the past few years. The new version on this release is a vast improvement with fuller instrumentation and almost infinitely better mix.

Thank you all for reading this and checking out the October country. This is going to be an especially cruel winter, I hope to have some very special material to share with you by early next year.