Before the World Sleeps is a collection of pieces for piano, mostly written between 2023 and 2024, during a time when the world seemed to be steadily on course towards ecological, political, and technological disaster. During this time, the rift between human experience and political reality appeared to be norm, to the point where counteractive measures trying to “combat” or “fight” an inevitable outcome, no longer felt sufficient.

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I made the decision to create this album in the fall of 2023, wanting to spend the following year writing and organizing music for piano from within this context—using some sort of post-hope perspective—where there was no assumption of control or even an expectation for having a long-term future. The goal was not to celebrate despair or calamity, or to come up with music filled with ideas about the end of the world. It was to reorient the compositional process to creating small pieces of music that I could finish quickly, and using an archiver's mindset, commit them to a recording rather than prepare them for public performance.

In an era filled with existential anxiety, locating meaning in creativity felt like a useful way of spending time that is concerned only with the experience of the here and the now. Composing music for Miranda and intended for recording, felt like engaging in an act of preservation rather than an act of self-expression. In the end, the 18 compositions included in this album were organized around four main "chapters" that I see as germane concepts to writing music during this time: narrative, memory, colour, and weather.​

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