It’s February 17th, circa 2pm. I’m sitting at my favorite coffee shop drinking a wonderful shaken iced tea shining with lemon. In the very early hours of this morning I uploaded the last piece to Sketchbook Page 3, called “Horses Endlessly Running”. With this, Page 3, which represents my work in music this Winter, is finished.

Moving into the Spring, I want to move in a completely fresh direction artistically, and explore the possibilities of music in a way that I haven’t been able to yet. I’ve developed a particular style over the past couple of years, and while I’m thankful that it had its time, I’m feeling like that time needs to come to an end in order for me to grow into the kind of musician I want to be: one who can make works that are both innovative and pertinent to our current point in history. My compositional instincts — the kinds of ideas that I gravitate towards, the ways of combining and sequencing those ideas that I typically come up with, etc — are feeling like old news to me at this point, to the extent that I’m finding it difficult to feel inspired to my usual degree. So, as a send off to my recent music, a way to reflect and then reset, I’m going to review (meaning give my brief thoughts / feelings on (no technical walkthroughs)) all of the music I uploaded publicly¹ to this website in 2024. ²

Writing about all of these pieces is both a way to celebrate them, and to say goodbye to them: as Nietzsche said, “that which we put words to is already gone from our hearts”. ³

I posted over 3 hours of music to emfred.com last year, so I’ll have to break this up into parts, each of which I’ll post as a separate review under my Music Reviews section. Below are links to each of them. I decided to give a grade to each of the Sketchbook pieces, but didn’t do the same for the RWW pieces, both because they’re less significant works and because the often terrible recording quality of the RWW recordings is such a stark contrast from the Skecthbook recordings that grading them on the same scale wouldn’t make sense.

With all of the Sketchbook pieces now graded, I can do a very 2020’s move and make a tier list of them. I’m combining “+” and “-” grades into single tiers. Listing is left-to-right = best-to-worst. When multiple pieces inhabit the same grade (e.g. multiple “B+“s or multiple “C"s), I’ll order them based on which one I intuitively prefer.

A: Ys, Hardcandy, Like Drinking a Shadow, Snowglobe
B: Not Even Past, There's No Love Highway, Checkerboard,
   The Leaves are Falling, Riverrun, Horses Endlessly Running,
   Another Sunrise, Circa Diem, Valkenburg Palace
C: Pocklebell, Pastels, Watermill, Time-knot
D: Lightworks
F: Hourglass

As always, thank you for reading and listening.

Banner image: the “Lemon Drop” iced tea mentioned in the opening paragraph. As the creator of this photo I declare it licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.