BRENDAN GLASSON

When I was recording this music, I had just quit my job at Mills College after it imploded and I was sustaining myself with a not-large-enough pool of savings. I decided to throw caution to the wind and try to live the life of riley for a while. I rented a big warehouse studio with some friends near 924 Gilman in Berkeley where I could record music.

I live in Oakland, almost 4 miles from the studio, but with the new expansiveness of my days, I got in the habit of walking to the studio most days, working for as long as I could, and listening to the day’s work on my walk home. The music came out of improvisations, and so is mostly captured as “live” performances, but I was free with editing and overdubbing. I recorded a lot of music—many hours—and then gradually reduced it to the collection that is this album.

Maybe because of the constant walking through both the rich and run-down neighborhoods of Berkeley and Oakland while I was listening back to my improvisations, or maybe because I would take breaks at the studio and look out the windows at the broken geographies of the cement factory across the street, I started to feel like the music was describing a landscape.

At the same time, I think, like many of us, I wanted the world to be different than it was, and I started to feel like I could in my way evoke little utopias through sound, at least to myself. These are not universally pleasant worlds, but to me they never seem cruel. So maybe this is my idea for a soundtrack for an elevated place, a highland.

-Brendan, Oakland, CA 2026 

Mastered by Nathan Corder
Artwork by Savithri Velaga
Wow! signal 2026