Enter Outside is a continuation of some of the same processes and themes that have been present in my work since Nature Always Needs Improving—minimal instrumentation, recording outdoors, an intentional mix of the mundane and sublime, among other things. As is now usual for me, most of this was recorded on the porch of a rural house in Maine. I keep trying to capture a feeling I get stepping into that space…it’s part of why this approach still feels fruitful for me. Given how stripped down my setup is, the addition of a singing drum as a sound and sound source is significant here. A thing that I enjoy about it is, much like the chimes I play and record, it’s hard to make this drum sound “bad”; acknowledging its tonal beauty, I then try to find other ways to engage with it and find a space within the drum itself. You can hear that especially on “Lullaby of the Eaves” and “Grace Arrives,” both of which feature the drum almost exclusively. In contrast, with “Pulling Out of the Driveway at Dusk,” you can hear the chimes in a more familiar setting—I was going for something especially hushed here, and the way that this performance plays out here—with one recording of it at its actual speed, the other slower and pitched down—creates some echoes and interplay that I appreciate deeply.

The idea of entering outside feels more intentional, more ceremonial, and more invigorating than simply going outside. My son is to thank for the title of this album and it was just a quirk of language that one afternoon, just after the album was complete, he said, “Let’s enter outside!” The language stuck with me, almost creating a philosophy around itself.

An influence on this album is an album by Kazuya Matsumoto released on Spekk in 2017—落ちる散る満ちる (which translates to “Drop Scatter Full”). On this recording, we hear the results of a wonderful idea: Matsumoto dissembled the plates of a glockenspiel, distributed the plates in different locations throughout a cave, and then recording the sounds of the water dripping from the cave’s ceiling. This kind of automated approach to composition (or at least documentation) really charmed me—the album itself is a one-hour documentation of the process and less of a curated “piece,” so to speak, but it did inspire me to leave the singing drum out in the rain and stick a microphone under it. You can hear the results of those experiments in the second half of “Grace Arrives”.