For this post, I felt it right to let the artist speak for themselves. John the Silent has been profound for me as a fan, listener, and curator of music. I hope you find your way into his world of wonder.

Most of these songs were composed and recorded in hotel rooms, pubs, and even airports in Florida. I often use songwriting to process experiences. I can remember working on my first John the Silent album Pollution/Opportunity, in 2019. I noticed how the process of composing and creating ambient/experimental music revealed new ways to explore emotions, impressions, and observations with sound and texture. Without the limitations of the structure of the music I usually make: verse, chorus, chords, words, lyrics, melody, I recall thinking that the creative process for ambient music felt more like painting than songwriting. It was profoundly liberating after the initial anxiety of how to start.

I’ve often said that music is therapy for me. John the Silent records hold a very special, very personal, internal space for me. I can hide a bit in these pieces that I can’t in my usual singer/songwriter world.

A challenge I’ve found, engaging in a medium that is primarily digital, often utilizing computers and software not only for recording and production, but creation and composition, is a kind of paralysis of possibility. I’ve come to believe that limitation helps creativity. Endless possibilities, at least for me, do not feed or energize, but restrict and paralyze. With digital recording, I find it easy to get lost in menus or settings, to the point where I don’t feel like I’m engaging with music, but with a program, a technology.

With John the Silent, I’ve dealt with this personal hangup by experimenting with self-imposed limitations on each record. I’ve made a John the Silent record using only obsolete iPads and keyboard apps, I’ve recorded live in mono through an analog board, and I’ve based an entire album on a phone-recorded prayer spoken by a beloved mentor in his final days.

For Florida Man, the limitation was space and timeframe. There isn’t much field recording (raw recording of an environment) on the album, but it was recorded in the field, in the space, and within the context of processing and engaging the heartbreaking wake of a devastating hurricane. I attempted to observe the surroundings, listen to the atmosphere around me, reflect on what I had seen and the conversations I had with people who were processing loss, and express them through music without words. I tried to keep intact those late evening or early morning initial compositions in the final mixes that became the album to be released next month.

John the Silent: Florida Man will be released on March 20, 2026 with a listening party happening on bandcamp on March 17th (due to rescheduling if necessary). The album is being released on digital and CD at the label bandcamp page as well as on CD and Vinyl on the somewherecold Elasticstage site.