Hoarding Ideas & Mining Past Moments
Is it ok to be creatively stuck in the past?
Hi all,
This week, my trio Sontag Shogun has a new album out (available for streaming or purchase)! This one was mostly the brainchild of my bandmate Jesse Perlstein, so I asked him to share some lessons he took from the process. What follows is an interesting reflection on the challenges and opportunities of hoarding past ideas. I hope you enjoy! As always, don't hesitate to reach out with thoughts or responses!
— Ian
Hi everyone,
It’s always been hard for me to throw things away.
I have drawers full of odds and ends, pieces of art installations I will never reinstall, half-written poems and stories in notebooks I pack into boxes, move after move, that sit on shelves in every home I’ve lived in. And countless songs, half-created in Ableton, sitting on hard drives, waiting to be forgotten. Maybe you can relate.
But every once in a while, my mind reaches out to them. I remember them — in particular, the feeling I had when I first created these things: where I was, who I was with, how I felt and who I was when I hit record and let loose.
Why do these moments matter? I could go on a diatribe about how all we are is a recollection of lived moments and how they influence our future choices, or how forgetting the past forces us to make those same mistakes in the future, or talk about the anxious grip of nostalgia…but the reality is simpler: They still matter if you make them matter.
Every one of these artifacts can be recycled and repurposed. They can become collages of unique and memorable moments, a way to time-bend, to experience things that might be impossible in physical reality.
One reason I love this approach is because I frequently forget how to do what I’ve done before. As a musician with no formal training, my idiosyncratic approach to music has always been a combo of wild experimentation and improvisation. I have full albums-worth of material whose genesis I can hardly comprehend. There is something precious about these unique sonic incidents and so I catalogue them, alongside my collection of field recordings (my “memory library”). It’s a place I can turn to for inspiration or for new material.
In 2019, while on an improvisational tour through Europe, my bandmate Jeremy Young had convinced Finnish artist Laura Naukkarinen (aka Lau Nau) that we should visit her home, on the island of Kimitoön, for a few nights and record together. There was no plan, no expectations, just rolling tape. The experience felt pure and beautiful, and at the end of the experience we had over 12 hours of material.
Fast-forward to lockdown, where we pen-pal-passed the material back and forth, completing over 15 songs, 12 of which were released as an album called Valo Siroutuu, a mix of folk, electronica, and ambient music that none of us would have made on our own.
But there were leftover songs, unfinished (un-Finn-ished?) material whose loss I couldn’t help but mourn, the constraints of the durational sides of vinyl. We talked about a re-release with bonus tracks or an EP — but I kept wondering: How much more beauty has been left buried? So I dove back into the sessions…ressurecting them from a dying laptop’s hard-drive. What I found was potential: violin loops, breathy voice, blips of modular synthesis, the crackling of a sauna or pluck of an out-of-tune guitar, a chorus of blown bottles, and of course the sound of the land that held us. I couldn’t help but wonder as I listened:
"Why can’t this be special too?"
I ended up leaning into collage, finding my favorite moments and cutting them together, overlaying and re-contextualizing them — a recording of a glockenspiel played beside a lapping shore sync’d up with a random synth progression and a harmonized vocal line from a totally different day. It felt like clues waiting to be collected and put together into previously unseen narratives. I invited a few other artists I admire to do the same thing, to hear their interpretations of this collection of sonic memories.
The result became an unexpected album, called Päiväkahvit, (out today on Beacon Sound!). It’s totally different from anything I expected it to be, the grease of serendipity loosening its gears in surprising ways. I’m excited to hear how it hits people.
Letting go is tough — the anxiety of losing something dear, the fear of change, the fear of losing yourself in the process can leave you blind to what exists outside of your lived experience, stunting your evolution. There’s a lot of value in the art of letting go, in letting something exist in its time and place, alone. Even now, there are still moments from our time in Finland that will be locked away to the listener and over time, be lost to our ailing minds.
But making this album was about the opposite impulse. It was about seeing the full value in what you’re bringing with you every day on your journey, and the way music and making art can remind you of that. It’s about reaching into the past while staying in the present.
Back in 2019, I was in a different place, worrying only about myself. Now I’m living in a different city, trying to balance fatherhood with artistry, a feat often fumbled. Maybe there was a pull to return to that previous time. Or maybe there was simply a desire to situate myself in its lee, to show myself that the value of that time still applies every day. To prove that I can still incorporate that beauty and stillness into my life, even on days full of chaos, dread, and doubt.
For those of you who don't speak Finnish, "päiväkahvit" translates to "afternoon coffee," which I find to be a frequent fixture in my now sleep-addled life. It’s also the perfect way to listen to music — inside, with a fresh cup, watching dust motes dance in the afternoon light, trying to exist outside of linear time.
Mine your moments,
Jesse Perlstein
Note: You can hear Jesse's weekly radio show here. The new album he talks about Päiväkahvit can be streamed here or purchased here.
Five Interesting Things
1. Is AI degrading our ability to think? It's rare I know what I'm going to write about in advance, but I will definitely write about this study sometime soon. Basically, MIT found that people using ChatGPT to help them write an essay had less brain engagement than those who didn't. Interesting.
2. Have you seen The Phoenician Scheme yet? I'm a huge Wes Anderson fan, so I can't wait to check it out. I enjoyed this video interview with Wes about his creative journey, his influences, and the stories behind his films. I don't think I've ever heard him talk before.
3. Two great suggestions in reply to last week's newsletter for original-sounding artists to check out: Ruby Ibarra (who won the 2025 Tiny Desk Contest) and Xenia Rubinos' "Whirlwind" (like a mashup of math rock with Tuvan throat singing or something).
4. Whenever I need a lift, I turn to Nick Cave's Red Hand Files, like this recent one on how he can feel genuine love for his audience despite them being total strangers.
5. I've been working on rhythm a lot recently in my piano playing, which has had me revisiting amazing drummer Ian Chang's course and particularly these lessons about internalizing rhythm.