BOSTON .
NYC.
USA.
SYRACUSE .
NYC .
WORLD .
It's funny, I didn’t set out to make the album you see here…
As an avid listener of those who fearlessly meld together Jazz, Soul, R&B, Electronica, even Gospel, and reshape them into something recognizable yet unfamiliar, intelligent yet emotional, predictable yet unexpected, I merely endeavored to add a layer to the ever-expanding tradition of the “Beat Tape.” Learning the Art of the Jazzy Loop from such masters as Tom Misch, Kiefer, Count Lazy, Eric Lau, Nujabees and countless others, I felt my bassist and partner Darren Frate might have some jam in us, to add to this toast.
But a funny thing happened as we started to swap files over Dropbox… songwriting got the best of us.
And here we are, a few months later, offering this amalgam as a gesture of thanks to those who opened our minds - from Miles Davis to Bela Fleck to Chick Corea to George Duke to Blue Six to Take 6 to Dilla to Robert Glasper and more...
We are CUT, and we aim to further a long tradition of seekers who deconstruct and rebuild, again and again, until we can rebuild no more, and pass on the tools we were lucky enough to fashion, onto others.
WORLD.
In 2008, I wondered what I was doing with my life, struggling to find a point in having founded a design firm in New York City and simultaneously feeling overwhelmingly stimulated by the rewards of my so-called success, a condition difficult for an immigrated French boy not to feel excited about.
But I realized I was asking the wrong questions, instead of wondering what I was doing, I should have been pondering who I was, a much more interesting journey to undertake. And so I started writing, on the subjects that matter to me most, whether death or movies, love or travel, digging deep inside myself to try and unearth the layers of small truths that have accumulated in forty years of existence and hopefully get to know myself.
The result was much more fruitful than I expected. That is because in addition to what I dug up, which would only be valuable to me, I discovered something much more useful: a process to question everything equally, which I have named The Considered Life. It is a tool for examining the choices we make from moment to moment and analyzing the causes and consequences of those decisions so that we may be certain they are ours and ours alone. This is self-consciousness, and empowerment lays within. This tool can be used by anyone, at any time for it is merely a way to think about your own life, a way which helped me define mine. Imagined as the opposite of dogma, The Considered Life simply encourages you to dig within your layers to explore who you really are.
And who I am is the kind of person who released a companion EP at the same time, titled: The Pressure.