Voltage & Pressure likens art, math, love, effort, song & sound into one

∼ + )))

I wrote these songs years ago. They were always something I figured I would turn into Voltage & Pressure eventually and well, eventually happened with 2020. The project became a way for me to stay mentally engaged/stable as the pandemic settled in. In a lot of ways, it’s like that meme of the person who’s been working on their bedroom folk ep of sad songs for 3 years, with it always being 2 weeks away from being done. Except, I actually finished it/am releasing it. + I’d consider it more of an album with how complete it feels to me.

The album looks at the end of a relationship between two people who thought about and approached the relationship completely differently. One forever analytical left-brained over thinker & one free creative right-brained artistic spirit. The album works through this end from the analytical perspective, trying to reconcile/justify/explain/understand all that’s happened. It’s like that conversation you finally have where you pour over everything and try to figure out what happened, what went wrong, how you got here, why it’s over. Of course, it never ends in a tidy logical manner. This album tries to express that feeling, that experience, my experience.

Art & math intertwine in these songs. A problem solver preferring to work things out pencil on paper opposite an artist preferring to brush color on canvas. A free thinker in love with solely the weird against someone who concludes people must logically have both normal and weird parts to their personality. Two dancers who move in parallel, seemingly never closer yet never farther from each other. A stone sculpture artist who obsessively sees their craft as a problem to solve and dwell upon instead of larger positive creative expression.

Love & effort appear as a celebratory feast. Effort works hard to be a part of this celebration, offering the fruits of their labor as centerpieces to the feast. But effort does not necessarily oblige love in return. So effort’s fruits may spoil and rot unreciprocated, turning to fear and jealousy. Facing this fear means returning to this now abandoned feast, revealing that the fear was of helping oneself. What one might find is that helping oneself may mean finding love for yourself within yourself first, without having to rely on others for it.

Voltage & Pressure mean a number of things. Of course there is the electricity and excitement one feels in a relationship as well as the pressure of protecting it long enough until it can endure on its own. But voltage and pressure are themselves two measurements of sound. In the air, sound is a pressure wave. In the digital domain, that same pressure wave is represented by a voltage waveform. Voltage & Pressure is an album of songs, but is ultimately just sound. A sound pressure wave I made in the air and captured digitally as a voltage waveform. Of course, at the end of sound, there is silence.


The mathematician solved the problem, but found the answer to not be a number, but a song.
The artist painted the song, but found the sound had already faded.
Together they heard the art in full color, but only in time past.
The silence arrived a cold cold blue, and so accepted the current end.