I'm putting out a record! Pre-orders for Fogery Nagles are live today on Bandcamp Friday through Astral Spirits. Full record released digitally and on vinyl October 6th. This is a pedal steel forward album with various other sounds and layers padding around that instrument.
Recorded in late 2020/early 2021, I was somewhat cognizant when I did this that the sounds I was making were influenced by the covid realities that we were all living through, but listening back to it now I can see even more clearly how this is a pandemic record. In my own listening at the time, I was more and more drawn to minimalist repetitions, less ambient per se and more hypnotic (I listened to Kali Malone's amazing "Sacrificial Code" every day for a year). Time and space felt both compressed and stretched, so it felt natural and somewhat integrative to steep myself in music that blurred things in a similar manner. When I started recording the musical ideas that eventually became this record, I let myself sink into that territory, sometimes just as an excuse to play the same music phrase over and over.
The title comes from Hattie. She was three and had a curious practice of cutting up tiny pieces of paper and crumpling them up into compact forms that she would pile up, referring to them as her "fogery nagles" (spelling approximated by me). When I started collecting fragments of musical ideas I saved them in a folder and gave it the same name, since it felt like a similar process of tinkering and accruing small forms until they had some mass collectively. It also sounded like an obscure offshoot project in the 60's/70's British folk rock scene, which I thought was funny. Turns out she was just trying to say "frijoles negros", which she picked up when we were reading Mama Provi and the Pot of Rice. So I guess eat some black beans while you're listening to this?
Huge gratitude to Astral Spirits and Nate Cross for releasing this. I'm pinching myself that this is entering the world on a label that puts out music by literal heroes of mine. I've always loved their cover art too, and Nate indulged me doing my best impression of their visual identity