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Communicate Results

Adventures in Panting: The joy, freedom, and exploration of space in time, place, sight, and sound.

Sandwiches From Vertical Strangers:
Trio music that sounds so intensely like the sound of living with my best friend and around the corner from a high priest of drumming that every time I hear a snippet of it, the whiplash of being transported instantaneously to wheeling my amp down the street at 2:30 in the morning with the aroma of a days work in sonic tomfoolery hits me with the force of Ben’s Telekinetic musical instinct and Thomas’s profligate supernova expulsions.

AKA: My friends and I played music and now it’s the first album of ours together.

I have sat on these sounds for such a long time because they never had a home, and without a home they have felt like a small solar system spinning off through the galaxy on its own. This is music that began as as a mere curiosity of painting, turned into an ongoing long form experiment, which turned into a a loose construct of art collective we called Adventures in Painting. In this particular facet and iteration it can be separated out into a set of sounds that can be recordings that can be put in an order on an album that brings us here.

This was recorded, produced, instigated, and made between June 2018 and May 2020, with revisions and processing done in the beginnings of 2021, then ordered into a workable album flow, then taken out of my hands just to FINISH it.


What the world says about:
The Hurricane of keyboards Thomas Mellan:

“Manically Unpredictable”
LA Times
“Truly Brilliant”
Cameron Carpenter
“License and Registration please”
San Francisco PD


And the man, the myth, the bear, the legend:
Benjamin Ring:

“Playing with Ben will give you an unrealistic expectation of what human beings are capable of.”
Vince Mendoza (6 time grammy award winner)
“You’re one bad dude”
Justin Brown
“That was the best possible drumming in this [very specific circumstance] I’ve ever heard. How did he do that?”
Literally everybody
“Wook atta Wittew Guuuyy! He’s so CUTE isn’t he!?!?!?”
Tristan Heinicke


Sandwiches from Vertical strangers is a compendium of the time we spent in iteration as a trio. Getting us all together was like herding cats, putting a collar on a snake, or even organizing honeybees into a line, but in all of its iterations the message rang true, we can make WHATEVER we want.

I take great joy in knowing that these two very wonderful people would probably have never ended up in the same place if it weren’t for my nagging insistence. Each one of these souls are literal forces of nature. It was partially circumstance, partially interest, and friends who only have commonality in the fact I drag them both places. Now we all get to enjoy what they’re capable of, and I just happen to be there!

Now we’re all off on other side of the country doing things that are completely different than before, but in many ways exactly the same. Until we meet again, this will be the first of a lifetime of intersections.

January 2022


(Ps January 2023)
Hey there, sorry this was so abysmally late. All 2 hours were nearly ready to go to the prom, meet the president, dolled up to take a ride in the motorcar February of 2022, before I lost both the hard drive and the proverbial thread by sitting right on it like a lost remote for a whole year where both nothing and everything happened all at once. Now the psychic distance between its inception, my current Seattle house, Ben's Latinamerican travels and Los Angeles legend status, and Thomas's living in Boston feels like opening an ancient burial site


Words from Thomas Mellan:

Ouch. Turn it off. That hurt my soul.

Music is my favorite kind of noise.

Music is made when you take away the limitation of making music. When you shed the lies of your makeshift identity and give the creature inside you it’s fucking Voice. And in that moment. You’re not just making music, you’re making full-on noise.

Ben and Tristan are the greatest musicians and people I’ve ever known. I wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for these two, and I’d definitely not still be making noise. These recordings, on my end, are the sound of doing, not trying. They’re the sound of my trust in humanity and life being restored by these incredible human beings. I hope you like these songs as much as I do. Because herein lie the roots of all the music to come. And all the music that came.


Words from Benjamin Ring

"I regret nothing"