It’s, uh, been a while. Let’s see if I even remember how to do this!

Hmm. Not quite the same style, but it’ll do for now. No artwork yet or anything.

These four tracks represent the stuttering collective output released post-Everything Comes Along. In a perfect world, I likely would have bumped some tracks from that release that I question now, and swapped these in. I think these are strong works that came from a mature perspective on that body of work.

That said, it also represents a period of slowing output as questions of mental health began to dominate my energy level and creativity. After working sporadically but with some collective regularity from around 2003 until about 2012, these tracks represent the output of weekends or evenings of light in long periods without. Maybe there’s some unique beauty to that, or perhaps I’m feeling maudlin. 🙂

You can download all four tracks together here.

I’m never sure what to say about Everything Comes Along, which was released in 2012. As the second full-length Ramp album, released after a two-EP endeavour, you would expect cohesion to be the theme. Instead, it’s a release that I see in facets.

The writing of Everything Comes Along overlapped the section of my life where I began to have to seriously deal with mental illness. It’s not an explicit theme of the album at all, but I can hear the oscillation of good and bad days in the tracks, and I know that some were struggles, and some felt like triumphs. It was a difficult album, but I think a rewarding one.

Some of my favourite individual tracks come from Everything Comes Along. Feel free to guess which ones.

You can download the full album here.

“Fountains,” was the second of a pair of sister EPs, comprised of Orchard Days and Fountains, intended to sit together but released about a year apart (the former in around 2007 and the latter in around 2008).

Fountains is probably my favourite consolidated release, and I believe that it’s representative of a mature Ramp. It also marks the release where I think I began to challenge myself to be less afraid of putting myself out there, but it’s still a young release with some early foibles. I hope that you enjoy it as much as I do.

You can download the full album here.

“Orchard Days,” was released in 2007, two years after collecting Peristalsis into an album in 2005. Although it was also released on a track-by-track basis over that time, it was the first thing composed with the intent of eventually collecting it into a consolidated release — two pairs of sister EPs, named Orchard Days, and Fountains.

I think the pair, Orchard Days and Fountains, mark the coming-of-age of Ramp. While there are still some rough edges, I’m very proud of a lot of the material on these releases, and I think they speak to who I am as a composer. Orchard Days falls into a structural and textural space that I would like to continue to explore.

You can download the full album here.

Peristalsis was the first full-length Ramp release. The tracks were released individually between about 2003 and about 2005. While it’s rough around the edges, I have a lot of love for some of these pieces, and I’m often surprised at how well many of them still play.

Track 3, “To the Sun,” features a reading by local Torontonian Lucas Chaos.

Track 8, “Star,” was featured as outro music in the Monkeyman Productions podcast, “Moonbase Theta Out.”

Download the full album here.

“Origin Stories,” is a small EP of connective tissue, mostly included here for historical reasons. It bridges the gap between old Ramp music, which consisted of very rough, early fooling around by a collective of people beginning around 1990 and petering out as unfinished solo work around 1993, and the modern incarnation of Ramp, which launched with the release of Peristalsis in around 2003.

Download the full album here.