Music

Jean Jacket Sojourns

My Youtube channel where I share songs I’ve written.

Dreamcraft Ruins

Dreamcraft Ruins is a moniker, a band, a musical place for recovery, a way of interrogating time with air. I and my collaborators work in genres like freak folk, lo-fi, indie rock, alt country, sound collage, and spoken word while often exploring atypical song structures (verse-chorus-verse-chorus is often unimaginative). Have a listen to Dreamcraft Ruins’ first album, Once a Dissident Interpreter.

Liner Notes for “Once a Dissident Interpreter”

To be Irenic

One day it will be as if we never were.

One day it will be as if we never were because our selves never were. The self is empty, so the empty teachings say. But then, if this is true, what is beyond or outside the self must not be empty. Or maybe all forms are empty except in relationship. Our existences must be composed of the existences of others—not only our loved ones and friends, but the ancestors of the planet, those whose bodies and consciousnesses interpenetrate our own, if not in this time then beyond time, in a realm where chance and orchestration mix beyond the limits of cognition and perception.

I wanted to understand these kinds of notions better, but I first had to learn of deep indifference to desire. My body and mind have undergone the most immense suffering of my life when I developed a chronic pain condition in the middle of recording the songs of this album. I’m still recovering as of this writing, though I’ve come a long way. The most difficult part of it was, for a long while, I thought my pain was completely mine. My pain, my fault, my self—so goes the cycle I have been working to break free of.

Pain, fault, self. These terms are only signposts guiding us through various realities we impel our forms to affirm. Through some needed, yet mostly hidden arrangement of information guiding our experience of the cosmos, we find ourselves affirming our lives, even in suffering. We have no other option, short of causing more suffering, more unbearable, cataclysmic suffering, which is still an affirmation of experience taken to its logical extreme—resistance. But resistance, like other conceptual forms, often prizes what it symbolically means over any real, tangible outcome. In seeking a purer resistance, we can get to the point that we resist everything; and sometimes, we are only left with a clinching wilderness whose open, chaotic energy counterintuitively knots life into shapes less free.

But now I am equalizing terms toward paradox. I think, more simply and practically, that we can only accept life around us as it appears to be now. No matter how we think life did or might manifest differently through forms we call control or abandon or even urgency, we still have to live now.

And for a form to be such as it always is in the now, it must be failed. We only experience continually failed representations of ideals, no matter who we are. And yet, these failed forms are rough around the edges so that they can be filled in, changed, broken, and reshaped for the present’s arrangement.

In these songs, I’ve tried to create experiences for others to fill in. I found myself sung through many things: fiefdoms, royalty, masks, alienation, war, rebellion, David Bohm’s ideas on quantum mechanics, past lives, one consciousness, fragmented states (of mind and of nations), the limits of stories, translation and interpretation, love.

But most essentially I was sung through the conservation of life, of all its possible experiences. Our selves are not only ours, and as hard as that is to embrace I hope these songs help you find, if nothing else, some healing and health in this statement. I hope they help you approach your form(s) in a way that betters your recognition of the unrevealed theorems and emotions your existence lives and is transformed by.

To conserve each other—nothing seems more peaceful and freeing than living as if we were never here unless we chose to be with, for, and by another. I’ve failed to do this so many times that I am now here, nowhere, with this music, telling all who listen: I, too, still have a large capacity to suffer.