By My Time At All Sides REMASTER

Enough said.
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BY MY TIME AT ALL SIDES

By My Time At All Sides offers a redemption of the songs from She Was A Coal Fire that I thought were worth saving. These tunes were not over, in my head, and I finally found the time summer 2022 to record them with care. I'm quite proud of the redos of She Was songs as well as the new tracks.
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School EP

Each of these tracks represents some different lesson in undergraduate music theory or musicianship. Most pretty strictly adhered to the assignment guidelines but some bore little resemblance to what my teachers might have imagined.

Track 1 is just a typical 12-bar blues with a C Jam Blues inspired melody. Track 2 is synth noise for some silly modal assignment. Track 3 is a version of Hedonist Quiz from She Was A Coal Fire… that I turned in (with some extra percussion) for a polyrhythm assignment. Tracks 4 and 5 were made for some sort of open-ended assignment. Track 6, which features my brother Joey playing a second guitar, was my submission for a hocketing assignment. Track 7 was a final project for a class on experimental composition. Track 8 was recorded much later than the others and was performed in response to my girlfriend, Valentina’s assignment in a music class to "respond" to a studied composition, for which she chose "All Blues" by Miles Davis. I played my SP-404 and she played the trumpet.
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SHE WAS A COAL FIRE, HE WAS SEVERAL THOUSAND TONS OF MAERSK CARGO

Most of these songs were written in my sophomore year dorm room at UCLA in 2018-19. The guitar in the recordings was likely recorded in the dorm or at my parents house over the years following. Overdubbing various layers including synths, drums, and percussion was a lengthy process that never really finished. My brother Joey contributed some catchy synth line overdubs at some point in 2020 during the pandemic, and fellow Horse Friend Julia added some electronic drums and samples. Joey’s synth is on Tracks 16 and 20, and Julia’s percussion is on Tracks 2 and 3. Most of the live drumming was performed by me but some was done by Lucas Moore, who helped me engineer the drum overdubbing sessions in their bus in the Mojave desert in 2021.

I grew so tired of these songs over the few years it took me to prep them for upload. The state I posted them in is not one I am happy with either, it pretty much signifies an abandonment of the project. This comes with varying remorse for different tracks. The strongest songs I have continued to work on and perfect, and I have since found pride in their growth from the time of the Coal Fire recordings. I really should have started redoing them long ago, the original dorm/home recordings were really nothing special. I just hate redoing. For other tracks like the interludes, I have also grown to accept their position in an album labelled "demos." They are really only sketches anyway, in the style of the rest of the project, and I think they sound as good as I could make them now.

It’s really the drumming and subsequent mixing that threw a wrench in this project, as well as my lack of confidence with singing. It’s hard to get home production to sound like your favorite band. But the learning never stops! Some of these songs will see the light of day again some day, and at the time of writing of this annotation (11/1/2022), this redo is a work-in-progress, and one I am proud of.

Even though the recordings were done all across space and time this album definitely captures the remnants of some dorm room angst. Beyond that I am happy to say that they also bridge the gap between the stuff I recorded as a "kid" and the stuff I dream of making now.
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Horse Friends :)
>new music snippets
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fucking tik tok reel for songs on new cursed album
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new song: Baptist Snack List, Wail (whale) song, etc.

This is the original recording of Wail Song. This one is really just a raw loop but it is raw indeed, I think. It features the Whale Wail at the end which is the fx send feedback looping on my cheap mixer that I used in college, and I’ve always been heartbroken by the overtones in that noise. I love this song and I am happy to have it here in its original form, as well as on Coal Fire, Ollie’s Bag, and future By My Time At All Sides.
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>Death Grips 2.0 by Death Grips, from The Powers That B / Jenny Death

video edited from high school camcorder footage (pre-2017) and animated text from a vision I had
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new Julius / Smash single

In middle and high school I found an independent art/comic/cartooning teacher in Redlands who met with their group of strange students in local cafes. I took lessons from and befriended Skip over many years, and got away with not drawing all that much and talking about all kinds of music and films that no tweenager should know about. They were great lessons.

I visited Skip again in college in 2018 after moving to LA for school, and we would continue our years-long conversations and brainstorms. At the end of the summer in 2018 I was continuing My Struggle Book 2 by Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Skip challenged me to write a song with the same literary ethos as Knausgaard’s memoir, or whatever I got out of reading those books.

These two songs are what I made of that assignment. I guess I tried my best. I think they’re corny.
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SLOP TOWER.

I did not feel good making or releasing Slop Tower. I still appreciate the songs today, they have some charm, but I really should have committed to playing them more faithfully. I used no metronome, I didn’t redo vocals, it’s generally a sound that makes me cringe which is not what I should be writing on my own website, but there it is. I guess I had to make pop punk at some point.
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winter 2018 and spring 2018 stop-motion reel, and a short film

This was my final project for UCLA's Stop-Motion Animation Workshop in spring 2018.

And this is a collection of very short stop-motion animation projects I made for fun and in a workshop at UCLA's TFT department. The practice from these shorts culminated in the production of my short film and final project for the class, which is also here in the videography.
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TWO SLEEVES LIVE in ISLA VISTA CALIF.
live at former 'jazz house' backyard stage, Nov. 2017
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some videos
>A losing battle is raging by The Caretaker, from Everywhere At the End of Time
>Panic by Animal Collective, from Ark

Video edited from camcorder footage shot during the first few weeks of my freshman year
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>Quixotica

Quixotica was my unofficial senior year of high school megaproject, whose work really started when summer began. A few of the songs had been born earlier than that. It sounds juvenile to me now but at the same time, I’m surprised how well it fits in with what I make now. I think I tried to cram a lot of sounds and references into one album in a way that felt messy at the time, but in retrospect I realize that might just be what Lee Pendu sounds like. Also I’ve learned a lot more about mixing and mastering.
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>two sleeves practice
thrash math bangers
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skating video
>1-800-GHOST-DANCE by Hella, from Hold Your Horse Is
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"The Instrumental Gerund Conglomerate" (EP) was another high school project of mine from before I was confident enough to sing. I think these songs have the same cute kind of emo charm as my Slop Tower songs but I recorded these much more carefully.
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