Mononoke is a solemn reflection on the past year or two and acts as the closing of a chapter of my life. At the beginning of this chapter, I made a grandiose, but ultimately ill-fated decision on impulse, for someone I once loved. As it turns out, it was a mostly disastrous and regretful decision. I found myself trapped in a parasitic, vindictive, and unhealthily codependent relationship. Escaping it and breaking the cycle of rekindling it was devastating, but allowed me to do a lot of self-reflection. Though, as a result of this relationship, I feel as though I've damaged myself almost irreparably and I'm still unsure if I'll ever fully recover. I've slowly been getting my life back together, but I've still lost a significant amount of time to this decision, and I feel permanently stunted in my growth as a human being.

However, this album is also one of catharsis; a culmination of spending a lot of time in the woods, surrounding myself with nature; reading a lot of books; delving into Japanese folklore and folk music, Icelandic neoclassical, ambient minimalism, and film scores; ruminating on personal failures and flaws, and my apparent lack of ambition; and the deep seasonal abyss I found myself unable to escape. All of these, broken down into their base emotional elements, are found threading their way through the album: elements of frustration, serenity, apathy, depression, romance, distress, futility, bitterness, condolence, but ultimately - as I hope is apparent - acceptance, catharsis, and convalescence. Someone close to me described the album as a collection of moods, and I like that.

All of the music on Mononoke was written and recorded during the Autumn of 2017 and Winter of 2018, a period I would simultaneously describe as a time of personal recovery and a time of withdrawal. Most of the acoustic instruments were recorded outside - in the woods, in the snow, in the rain - to permanently engrain my surroundings into the music. There are no lyrics, as there were no words I could string together to really convey what I wanted, so the album is left intentionally instrumental. I feel that the song titles themselves speak volumes enough to make up for it. Certain aspects of the music were composed aleatorially, atonally, or improvisationally (to read more about the background and composition of the album, please go to the info page for the last track).

As with the previous release, Enenra, this album is titled after a malicious spirit from traditional Japanese folklore, the Mononoke, a harbinger of suffering and disease. A fair amount of the music and imagery here is directly inspired by tales of such spirits and acts as parallels to my own experiences during these tumultuous periods of my life.

I generally don't talk about myself in such vulnerable or melodramatic ways, but I think this is an important part of what it means to be an artist, a term I've slowly grown to accept for myself. I hope this comes off as an honest attempt at musical dialogue, and not pretentious or self-aggrandizing theatrics. I hope you've gained some insight into the album and its creative process.

Thank you for listening and reading,
Matt