Meet CLOUDWARMER

MUSIC
The decisions I make with song titles and designing album artwork are just as significant to me as the actual music. I would say that song and album titles are a combination of satire, social and political commentary, and personal anecdotes with underlying sci-fi or fiction elements. Alternative histories, critiques about consumerism etc. For album artwork, I have a process that is probably similar to what you would see in a magazine like Adbusters. I look for public domain material (like ads from the 1940s and 1950s) and collage it into my own designs and color schemes. I am a big fan of European New Wave and Noir movie posters from this same time period. I do not try to exactly replicate this style but these posters do a great job at conveying emotions to the person viewing it. Images can have as much power as sounds or words and I try to keep this in mind.

Most of my music projects involve using public domain dialogue samples at the start or end of songs. I usually use samples from sci-fi or horror radio plays from the 1930s to the 1950s. Orson Welles's radio plays in particular are something that I have sampled consistently for the past decade. I look for audio that is unknown or forgotten. Sounds that have disappeared from the collective memory. The sound of Cloudwarmer is difficult to put into a specific genre, other than it being instrumental electronic music. People will typically use terms like downtempo, trip hop, or lo-fi to describe it. Sometimes people call it hauntology, vaporwave, or signalwave. These are genres that I was unaware of even existing before I was told I was in that 'genre.' Like I said before, the atmosphere and feeling of the albums is just as important to me as the actual sound. I have quite a few other projects with friends that I would consider to be similar, as in they are also instrumental music projects. I composed the soundtrack for a few independent films and short films in the past 6 years as well and I released this music under my actual name.

INFLUENCES
I think a lot of musicians have clear ideas about the genre or microgenre they are trying to fit into. Music communities are fragmented and specific now, and the easiest way to get people to listen is to fit into that specific 'sound.' My influences are not as direct and I think they are more subconscious. I first started making instrumental music when I moved to New York City. At that specific time, I was heavily listening to Leonard Cohen's "Songs of Love and Hate." That album has a sort of dark minimalistic haunted energy. The atmosphere of this album was influencing, but it is a completely different genre of music than what I make. My influences are maybe less clear and ambiguous. I have never sat down to record and intentionally made a song that sounds like someone else. Recently, and over the years, people make a Boards of Canada comparison. This is nice but I never really got into BOC in a way that would influence me. I would say that I have listened to the Tricky album "Maxinquaye" so much over my life that it has likely subconsciously influenced me.

RECORDING PROCESS
Over the years I have collected a large variety of VST plugins or MIDI instruments from companies like Spitfire Audio. I rely heavily on effects plugins and primarily use Valhalla plugins. Making percussion and beats is really a mix of typical programmed beats and acoustic sounds that I record myself. When I look for dialogue samples, I typically try to find pre-1950s audio that is unknown or not widely known. Public domain material. I would never sample something that is recognizable. - CLOUDWARMER

I Know the World Reasonably Well and Am Right About Everything - Released 2026
This is my most recent album, released this May on the fantastic netlabel Blocsonic. The dialogue samples I used for this album are more modern than what I typically use, but still public domain. I found audio recordings of remote viewing sessions from the 1960s and 1970s. Stanford Research Institute and the US Military spent a lot of time investigating what people call 'pseudoscience' topics. I discovered these recordings and spent about a year going through them to find samples. The title of the album is a satire and refers to a sort of collective distrust that the American public has in institutions. Scientists, academics, and experts are no longer trusted in the way that they used to be. Many Americans will watch a 15-minute long YouTube video on a topic, and then consider themselves informed on the topic. They will read a tweet and then say they 'have done their research.' This collective distrust of institutions and experts has been amplified in the past decade. Everyone acts like an expert on every topic, even though they are not. - CLOUDWARMER

We Might Even Exist Together on the Outer Fringes of Uncertainty - Released 2025
This album is not a typical album like the others. It is a collection of unreleased songs and it is very long. I usually record about 30 songs for each album and only end up using half of them. Over the course of 6 years I ended up with quite a lot of songs that I did not release. I was initially hesitant to release an album like this, because I want each album to tell a story. These songs were from different years and it was difficult attempting to put it together. To make it feel consistent and not feel scattered. I am very proud of it though and feel that it works. - CLOUDWARMER

Nostalgia For a Future That Never Happened - Released 2024
Orson Welles's radio programs from the late 1930s feature heavily on this album. His voice carries a lot of weight and has a dark foreboding energy that I felt matched the collective feeling of America in 2024. The album title refers to the propensity to have nostalgia about the past but also a nostalgia for the 'future' things that have not happened. The future envisioned in sci-fi films has not happened. While we have had advancements in science and other aspects of society, we also do not have flying cars. We have A.I. slop, iPhones, and chatbots that do not work. We can't build things that help people, but we can build data centers. Most Americans feel that things are getting worse, not better. The album title is about this. - CLOUDWARMER

The Quiet Haunt - Released 2023
This album is an example of me using samples that are very, very old. I found recordings from the 1920s of Christian sermons and 'revival' style church gatherings. These recordings feature a lot of gospel choir style singing in between the sermons. It was difficult cleaning up the audio, because 100-year-old audio has a lot of 'noise.' The song titles on this album are not directly social or political commentary like most albums. Some titles reference quotes from Twin Peaks, while other titles were meant to mimic Gospel song titles from that era. I was going for a sort of dark Gothic atmosphere for this one. - CLOUDWARMER

Anthropocene - Released 2018
The first CLOUDWARMER album. Each song is about a man-made environmental disaster, starting with the Trinity Nuclear Bomb test in 1945. Each song has a dialogue sample of news reports from each event. This album has a very clear theme and is what I would describe as 'eco-horror.' -
CLOUDWARMER