Great Music

I love music. I listen to it all the time. I make it too — electronic compositions as Infinite State.

My client of choice is Apple Music, mostly for the lossless quality. As I get older, I notice my tastes shifting from the intensity of rock toward the texture of electronic music. The wide audio spectrum of heavy guitar is more taxing to my ears than it used to be.

Favorite Albums

These are the albums I keep coming back to, years later:

• Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd — The purest expression of absence I've ever heard.
• Lateralus by Tool — Consciousness and spiral dynamics rendered as music. Still finding new things in it.
• Under Pressure by Logic — Vulnerable, ambitious, honest about the cost of ambition.
• My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kanye West — Whatever you think of the man, this album is a masterpiece of maximalism.
• The Life of Pablo by Kanye West — Messy, unfinished, alive. The most honest thing he ever made.
• Make Yourself by Incubus — The album that defined a specific kind of late-90s introspection.

What I Listen To

Hip-Hop — Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West, Logic, J. Cole, Eminem, Travis Scott, Baby Keem.

Rock — Tool, Incubus, A Perfect Circle, Chevelle, 311, Rage Against the Machine, System of a Down, Linkin Park, Nirvana, Foo Fighters.

Classic Rock — Metallica, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac.

Electronic — Puscifer, Moby, Deadmau5, Beck.

My Own Work

I release electronic music as Infinite State. A few tracks that mean something to me:

• She May Require Lithium — From Messengers Rising. The title says it.
• Consistent Inconsistency — From Unmastered Impulses. A meditation on living with a mind that won't hold still.
• Nintendo Dreams — Pure nostalgia rendered as sound.
• Reminiscence — From As Above, So Below.

Top 100 Songs

A snapshot from Apple Music — what I actually play on repeat:

Music is the thing that works when nothing else does. When the words stop making sense and the code won't compile and the brain is doing its thing — there's always something on this list that meets me where I am.