Music

This project is a creative reunion for its members, Chris and Rick.

We first made music as Modern Day Future around the turn of the century in Baltimore. We played bars and open mics and wrote some original songs along the way. We had several fans. When life pulled us in separate directions in the mid-2000s, we quietly retired that project.

In May, 2023, we were messaging each other before work about recent music-making activity. A common thread emerged. Our solo sessions were sporadic. Ideas were generated and briefly explored, then left to wither on the vine. There was no real process or practice; only brief, isolated, creative bursts with no direction.

After an offhand suggestion from Chris, we agreed to experiment with aligning our creative efforts in a remote / asynchronous framework that would allow us to revisit and advance ideas gradually over time, as our availability allowed. We didn’t have a specific goal in mind, aside from simply making more music together.

A year passed with little movement. To kickstart things, we booked a long weekend at a creekside cabin in Southwest Virginia, where we cleared the living space and converted it into a temporary recording studio. We ate, slept, and focused the remaining time on what we wanted to create. We developed ideas that we brought with us to the cabin and created guidelines and scaffolding to help us quickly generate new ones.

The output from that weekend was raw but encouraging. After listening to the first batch of rough mixes, we remember thinking “there’s something here – we should definitely keep going.” That first concentrated effort gave us sketches for five of the eleven tracks on Hours, Minutes, Decades. The remaining six compositions gradually took shape over the following year. We worked independently in whatever windows of time we could find, passing files back and forth and typing into a series of barely organized shared documents. We’d occasionally connect on video calls to review work in progress and discuss idea development. Little by little, the album came together.

We often joked that this project’s progress felt asymptotic. Every milestone moved us closer to a finish line we could see, but there was always a little further to go. Now that the work is finally done, we’re excited for you to hear it.
credits