Breakers

About Breakers

Breakers is a B-side from my album Music For Sunsets. I really liked the track, but couldn’t figure out where it fit so it didn’t make the cut.

Shortly after Israel’s genocide against Palestinians escalated in October, Yaz Lancaster, who helps run people places records, reached out to all of us on the label to see if we had any tracks we could contribute to a compilation album to raise funds for Within Our Lifetime, a Palestinian liberation organization based in New York. Of course I said yes, as I both wanted to help and to get this piece out.

It only had the synthetic waves, the chords, and the drum beat (which I was really proud of!), so I went ahead and added a new synth part and improved the mix. Some aleatoric filter sweeps that ended up sounding like seagulls got me thinking about forlorn beach scenes, and a picture a friend had shared of burned wooden Palestinian fishing boats on a beach in Gaza suddenly came to mind. The piece already had the name Breakers before that, as it was my first experiment with break beat style drum parts, but the name just continued to make some kind of intuitive sense with the context.