HANZō SWORD VS. MOON GOD

I was a stay-at-home parent in 2018 with no gumption to play live shows, but the desire to make sounds and songs never left. Production music suddenly made sense (meaning: music licensed for use in film, television, radio and other media), and it was something I could do from home. I called the project Khonsu Samurai and it changed the way I make music.

THE GOOD: The process honed the recording and mixing skills I had started with Sexxtopus, and I got to make any genre of music I wanted. Which led to...

THE BAD: My mind is a bag of feral badgers. Left to my own devices meant making music too weird or "noncommercial" for general use. But I made A LOT OF IT. I was churning out 2-3 pieces a week with little regard to who wanted to hear it. I guess I wanted to hear it, so I did it anyway.

While remastering this material as part of my Lost Decade retrospective, I discovered a dozen tracks never released in any capacity. It also seemed like a fine time to put these pieces together into themed mini-albums, which lead down the rabbit hole of graphic design and video editing. Just like it had done in 2018, the Khonsu Samurai project pushed me into new technology and new ways of releasing music.

I always work best in bulk, so creating short videos for Sexxtopus, Demos Lost & Found: 2013, and the Khonsu Samurai collections solved the dilemma of a vacant Instagram page. As I reacquainted myself with the (sorry) state of social media, video was the only way to share audio directly on a platform like Facebook. I was up for that challenge with plenty of musical material to sharpen my katana and fight to the mountaintop. Most of these videos will end up on Instagram—and probably TikTok and YouTube—over time, but in the here and now I’m enjoying the process for what appears to be a necessary skill for any musician in our current era. So here’s my most recent effort: a short trailer for the Khonsu Samurai collection.