Ache is a short, unreleased EP created specifically for this application. It began as a personal challenge and a deliberate step in repositioning my songwriting practice more explicitly as compositional work, as well as a focused exploration of the directions I hope to pursue during my PhD. The EP was written immediately after completing my 2025 Halloween album PS, a post-punk horror anthology that returned to simpler songwriting and more traditional structures. In contrast, Ache marks a shift back toward the computer as my primary compositional instrument, allowing new sound worlds and formal ideas to emerge.

Although the pieces remain within a more traditional song length, they were composed using the same underlying method as Magpie. Each work is constructed from distinct musical cells that define its contour and shape. Within each cell, harmonic material is intentionally limited, and form is driven instead by changes in arrangement density, energy accumulation, and shifting sonic worlds. Genre in these pieces is largely elusive, but each part follows the same cellular logic as Magpie: distinctly sectioned sound worlds whose contrast and internal development guide the overall form. In Well, narrative motion is led primarily by melodic development, while The Blood relies more heavily on instrumental ideas punctuated by focused lyrical moments.

Sonically, Ache grew from a prompt to merge what I’ve come to recognize as my own sound with ambient music. The results sit somewhere between songwriting and composition, borrowing from ambient music and minimal composition as much as they do from pop song styles and electronic music. With these pieces, I aimed to let sound and structure carry narrative weight in ways I more often assign to text, deliberately avoiding many of the stylistic habits and production techniques I tend to rely on. Elements of pop, indie rock, and drum and bass remain present, but function in a supporting role rather than as primary drivers.

I tend to think of these works more as paintings than as songs. They are studies in contour, texture, and atmosphere, and I see them as a starting point for extending this approach across a larger formal scale.