On your previous album Yes It Will and EP Strata, you worked with Valgeir Sigurdsson and Alexander Overington. Who did you work with on this album, both on the production side and the players, and how was the working process different than on the earlier albums?

Breaking English is the first album I’ve produced myself, a factor that probably had the most significant impact on both the process of creation and the resulting music.

Those previous recordings you mentioned – Strata and Yes It Will – were the result of a bifurcated sort of approach: an ensemble would commit improvisationally driven performances to a recording, which would result in a fixed take that could be elaborated upon with production. The idea was to bottle the ephemeral kind of moments of real-time connectivity that feel as though they could only result from an improvising ensemble, and then be able to sculpt and enhance them slowly using the studio, without any sort of temporal or performative constraints.

But in making those recordings, it became clear to me that I would never be able to penetrate a certain surface level of interaction between those interests unless I learned to produce and sound design myself. I was increasingly drawn to the work of sound artists who use the studio as their instrument and for whom sound itself is the basis for composition—folks whose music transforms familiar sounds into evocative, breathing things that contain multitudes. In particular, I became interested in the interaction between sound and memory, using these techniques to represent and comment on my own experience.

So, in order to make Breaking English, I had to recalibrate my whole approach. I swore off of the kinds of methods I was most comfortable and familiar with, refusing for the most part to allow myself to write music from the guitar or with an ensemble in mind. Instead, I opted to focus on sculpting fragments of sound until I was able to create an environment that might inspire form. Almost all of the pieces on this album grew out of that process, and the ones that didn’t ended up being molded by it all the same.

Though in a very different way than my early work, improvisation plays an important role on the new record. Many of the pieces involve systems of interacting processes that affect sound in sometimes unpredictable ways, so many of the skills I’ve developed as an improviser came into play constantly. The same can be said for my improvising collaborators on this record, who I brought in at various stages throughout: Ian Chang, Marcus Gilmore, Jackson Hill, Nina Moffitt, Chris Pattishall, Anjna Swaminathan, etc. Often, their role was to “shock the system” with their own input, which I would in turn fold back into my process. Though there is very little group improvisation documented on this album, many of the attributes I love about music that usually arises from that sort of setting – the power of sound, transcendence, intricate yet fleeting interactions between various elements – are very much a part of the record.

Though I took the reins on production and sound design, Paul Corley ended up being an indispensable resource in that area, commenting on my drafts and contributing some additional layers of processing, which I folded into most of the tracks. Also, the finishing touches came into place during my time working on the mix with Alex Somers. I learned a great deal from both of them. The same must be said about Ryan Lott (founder of Son Lux), who has been extraordinarily generous with ideas, resources, and information over the past few years that I’ve been learning how to make music from this viewpoint. He and Ian were always listening to my drafts and weighing in often, which was crucial.

This was a new way of working for me, but the uncertainty, excitement, and dread all individually propelled me towards finding myself inside of the music I was making. In the end, it feels more vulnerable than anything I’ve ever put out there—[bites nails].