‘Until Autumn’ refers to how this music came about; it was written, rehearsed, performed, and recorded July-August 2014, between my second and third years of college. The album is my biggest undertaking to date, and it marks both a musical beginning and an ending. For one, it is my first artistic recording, and my first (completed) large project of adulthood. But at the same time, this music has everything to do with my pre-adult life. It is primarily my own synthesis of the music I grew up with and am most familiar with, and hence a summary or culmination of my formation. My aim was to construct an environment uniformly compatible with the musical languages I am most enamored of. Japanese video game soundtracks, English rock, Balkan folk, German classical, and American jazz all float to the surface here, and for the first time, I haven’t needed to discard some of these for others; after years of wondering how to unite these divergent styles, I finally balanced them naturally, without forcing bits and pieces together. As a result, I have the seeds of a musical identity all sown in one field.
The four tracks are designed to be listened to more than once and in both the order given and its reverse. On every level of structure, there are details that connect the tracks. They all have motifs and gestures in three categories – for each track, there is material that is unique to it, material that originates in it but appears elsewhere, and material that comes from another track but is reused or transformed. This applies to features as far back as key structure and as close up as specific themes; uncovering these relations gives a listener a way to organize his/her listening, and making the connections between material across several minutes and/or sections allows for more complex and nuanced perceptions of the music. That said, such relations can be covert, and it is perfectly viable to listen to the music moment-to-moment, that is, to evaluate what’s heard as it’s heard. Either way, the music is meant to be enjoyable and relatable, not challenging or abstruse.
– Jacob Shulman

October 27th 2014
Los Angeles