anxiety machine
mortality awareness day

Through modular synthesizers, organic textures, loopy doopies and other mysterious techniques in ambient music that have over time revealed themselves to anxiety machine (AKA Mark Glick), mortality awareness day serves as both an exploration of the traumatic moment for the world's collective consciousness and an open invite to release the burdens it has piled up within us.

click here to download the album for free!

1. how ya been?
2. nostalgia hammer
3. i am never going to die
4. mortality awareness day
5. bird teeth
6. obligatory dream sequence
7. reality whiplash
8. bad day
9. bad day 2: bad day's revenge
10. bad day 3: bad day is the hero now
11. brain fog
12. well, you know
13. thaw
14. keep coasting for as long as you can

This record came out on March 12, 2021, which marks an entire year since the last time i was able to go to a public live music event. I saw Telefon Tel Aviv at Valley Bar. Rumblings of a pandemic were in the background, and beyond enjoying the artist, I felt that I “had” to go to the show because I was starting to hear that attendance was down and artists needed support. I left halfway through his set because I was overcome by the claustrophobia of the basement venue coupled with a completely irrational fear that everyone in the club was going to get me sick. The next day I cancelled my birthday, and a couple days later the world ground to a halt.

All those words come with the caveat that a lot of people have had it significantly worse over the course of the past year, but like a therapist would say, “why can’t both things be bad?”

This album was produced mostly in single takes and edited down into smaller scenes. Forcing myself to improvise & try and trust my own musical intuition has been a tool to battle self doubt that has been implanted in my skull for most of my life. A lot of reading and introspection and thinking about what makes music - getting into modular synthesizers and the world of monome stuff opened my ears to a lot more than I was listening for on that front. Perfect takes exist because they have the confidence to be perfect.

I’ve been lucky enough to be able to focus on this stuff as a way to bury my head in the sand during our collective Worst Year.

thanks: karin, norman, benj, jeff, sam, sean, ben, owen, preston, gurch, lines community, zoloft, wifi, that one video of dakim on boiler room, and the real star of the show: isolation.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

  



PLEASE CLICK THE LIL BUTTON ABOVE AND DONATE TO ANXIETY MACHINE

EMOTIONAL PATCH NOTES::

how ya been?
i’m bad at staying in touch with people. a call.

nostalgia hammer
guitar + pedals. i recorded this by mic’ing an amplifier and slapping some pedals. i really like that you can hear the buttons clacking a couple times. this song is ~about getting stuck in a loop remembering & thoughts of your past (better[ish]) times getting caught in your skull.

i am never going to die
ableton + samples of past improvisations. this song is inspired by thinking, while doing something like driving a car, that death is something that happens to other people.

mortality awareness day
0coast + mother32 + pedals. if you’ve ever counted the number of noses you’ve seen at the grocery store, you get where this one is coming from.

bird teeth
mother32 + norns (cheat codes). last year i committed really hard to message boards, and found lines (llllllll.co). i thought this one sounded nice and it sounds like birds talking to each other. there might be a deeper meditation here.

obligatory dream sequence
norns + dx7. norns was sequencing the dx7 while i also played along to it. i’ve really enjoyed the realization that we can collaborate with gear just as much as make it do what we want. norns was playing a (somewhat) random sequence in key, and i played along, but at this point i can’t tell what notes were my choice and what came from the machine. this song is ~about waking up every day and that seemingly being the only constant routine anymore.

reality whiplash
modular synthesizer, just friends + mangrove (& more etc). i took the plunge into eurorack last summer. after thinking about it for a few years. at that point, it was in the early(ish) parts of quarantine and my brain was a sponge. replace times of dread with learning and experimenting. pretty sure this mood came about when i was worried about all my friends on the west coast being surrounded by fires.

bad day trilogy
modular + sp303. three variations on a similar patch. these came about on the day that all the q anon psychos stormed the capitol. writing this now, i think about the confusion, and also lack of surprise, of that day. disappointment burnout/overload. i dont know if i specifically tried (or succeeded) to capture that.

brain fog
modular (heavily featuring Data Bender). stressed out that i am unable to form a sentence without getting distracted by something.

well, you know
a response. cello + pedals. we’ve gotten to the point where you don’t have to say you’re sad or worried or scared when making small talk.

thaw
modular. everything ends! even bad stuff!

keep coasting for as long as you can
ableton programming, with phasing loop lengths and different probabilities and random chances. let the machine play itself. haha maybe i’ve gotten used to staying home? maybe i’ll go to a public event and leave early?