yesterday i reached half a century of life so i decided to release this album i’ve been sitting on for a year or so. i wanted to release it in the summer but only finished it toward the end of last august. it was inspired by listening to a lot of peaceful, ambient music during long and sometimes stressful patches of work on my game. records like that are like an ocean of calm to me in what is feels like a turbulent world. in particular, records like ‘weaving a basket’ by sea oleena and ml buch’s ‘suntub’ (whose album cover this one is a nod to). a huge thankyou to those artists for the healing music.

https://spacerecordings.bandcamp.com/album/oceans-dream

some background on the title… (warning – contains lots of nerdy guitar info! but that’s what i love blogs for.)

ocean is the name i chose for my new-ish fender ‘american vintage 1966 reissue’ jazzmaster in lake placid blue. despite guitar being my main instrument, it’s the first i’ve acquired since the gunmetal blue (now faded to a deep racing green) 1988 usa standard telecaster i bought after working a summer job on a norfolk farm in 1993 (known as ‘tree’). though that guitar features on the majority of my records, it was in an attic in vietnam when i made lone survivor, so the one used on that was actually my even earlier korean 80’s squier stratocaster that my daughter now uses. my first guitar, bought in 1991 when i started my first shoegaze band, ‘nowhere’. i’m not sure if that one has a name but it is one hell of a guitar too. olympic white. at some point the pickguard was painted a custom tortoiseshell with my no doubt toxic 80’s games workshop miniature paints (makes it sound better imo).

anyway this is ocean’s dream. ocean has a sound that’s like waves and water as you’d expect, to my ears shining and full of energy, undulating and infinite. i am so lucky to own this beautiful instrument. it will be the main one i use, i hope, for the rest of my life. whereas with tree i have done zero maintenance since owning it, i have put hundreds of hours of fine-tuning into ocean: it’s always having different issues, it was terribly setup out the box. it goes through expensive chrome flatwound strings like nobody’s business.

these fender offsets (the type of guitar body that is offset for comfort that, as kevin shields says, go forward) are really like the 50’s american hotrod cars they were inspired by: they are fiddly and require a lot of tuning, but when everything’s where it should be, the way they chime is a beautiful thing. this album is an exploration of it going through a lot of pedals and two amps (including the fender 1964 handwired ‘deluxe reverb’ reissue that i felt i needed to complete the sound… my papa used to say always get the tools for the job… i guess? nope, can’t really justify it, but it is really wonderful.)

mostly guitar, zero drums. some sax and piano here and there. i wanted to make something peaceful that maybe could help filter out some of the negativity in the air*. i wanted to imagine what ocean would dream about. i hope it is helpful to you in some way.

peace and love,

~jasper

ps if you listen carefully you might spot some tracks that turn out to be featured in some form in my new game. you may be the first to hear them, in which case.

* … it is a shame that fender’s been in the press for negative reasons lately … hopefully they turn it around …