How a little August release recap turned into a story about getting here.
Greetings and salutations! If you are new here, welcome, and if you are returning, welcome back. I am excited to have you here in our very colourful and increasingly expansive Coterie world. Patrick is the name. The founder of the Arts Coterie Project, and I am also the voice behind Reverend Graye.
I am Gen X, which means I had the wonderful experience of growing up from the 1970s onward with what we now call classic rock, disco, new wave, punk, alternative and industrial music, along with whatever great Billboard hit happened to be everywhere at the time. My musical repertoire has only expanded since then. We get older, but apparently the goth, the raver and the club kid never got the memo.
We get older, but apparently the goth, the raver and the club kid never got the memo.
A Long Way from the Candle Stereo
I had my own stereo from Consumers Distributing, a Candle unit with a radio, 8-track and record player that handled 45, 33 and even 78 RPM records. My grandparents still had a collection of 78s, and I loved listening to them at their place. The crackle, the imperfect sound and those very raw vocals felt incredibly alive. Long before I knew what a studio was supposed to look like, I was already fascinated by the way sound could carry a whole world.
Like many kids at the time, I began with a recorder, then moved through autoharp, viola, alto sax and eventually guitar. I also started writing poems and songs in my early teens. It was always an on-again, off-again affair: poetry slams, open-mic nights in Vancouver and even a little performing with a band. My roommate at the time, who was from Mexico, was the lead singer for a punk mariachi band called Los Malos. At one local event, I got to play with them and perform three of my own songs as the opener. Having a full band behind me and getting to really rock those songs out was amazing. It was exhilarating and also... so totally not me. Nearly all of my friends seemed to be ridiculously talented musicians, and I spent many nights drinking, smoking and hanging around while people jammed. I enjoyed performing when I was younger, but as I got older I realized I was much happier behind the scenes, making things happen without necessarily needing to be the person standing at the front of the stage.
Around 2004, before I put the guitar down for good, I began playing with a 16-track digital recorder, vocals and a synthesizer, then uploading those experiments to MySpace. Remember when MySpace was basically our cloud? It turns out it was not a particularly reliable one. A power outage fried my computer and literally damaged part of the hard drive; later, the music I had uploaded disappeared from MySpace as well. Years of experiments essentially vanished. I eventually found two early songs buried in old emails, and in 2010, after being gifted a Mac desktop, I started learning GarageBand and gave some of those ideas another life. At the time, I was mostly interested in ambient and experimental music. I was exploring, making strange little sonic things because I liked making strange little sonic things, and not worrying very much about where they might lead.
The next shift came during what I lovingly refer to as covidanity. A separate illness kept me at home for roughly eleven months, which was bizarre for someone who had always worked and often held two jobs. Sitting still was never really my thing, so I started exploring what modern music creation had become and bought my first proper digital audio workstation. The learning curve was brutal. I could not remember music theory properly anymore, and I had almost no understanding of how digital sound actually worked. Then I found Reaper. It made sense to my brain, and its tutorials finally helped me understand what the hell I was doing. As my health improved and covidanity slowly loosened its grip, I returned to work and had less time to play producer, but by then I was serious enough to invest in a synthesizer, microphone, audio interface, small starter DJ console and an upgraded computer. By 2021, I had begun releasing music as a hobby.
When the Way I Created Had to Change
There has been a great deal of grief in that change: the practical grief of losing physical abilities, the professional grief of leaving a career I spent decades building and the strange identity shift that happens when the things you assumed you would always be able to do suddenly become negotiations. I have good days and bad days. Sometimes a flare knocks me flat for weeks; sometimes I get a wee little remission break if I am lucky. What I have learned, repeatedly and not always gracefully, is how to adapt.
These days I write, compose, produce and build music using whatever tools my body allows me to use, and yes, that includes generative AI. For me, it is one tool in the studio, not a replacement for having ideas. The ideas were already there: written songs, half-finished concepts, strange experiments and entire albums living in notebooks and in my head. New tools gave me another way to bring them into sound when the old ways became physically impossible. The method changed because it had to; the need to create did not.
Somewhere in all of that, my little hobby became something much larger. The Arts Coterie Project began taking shape as a home where different creative worlds could live together without fighting for shelf space in my brain: music, characters, stories, visual art, wellness work and strange ideas that refuse to behave. Apparently they all needed a house. Since I am no longer preparing the perfect medium-rare steaks, I suppose I am serving sonic vibes instead.
Since I am no longer preparing the perfect medium-rare steaks, I suppose I am serving sonic vibes instead.
And Apparently August Got a Little Ridiculous
Which brings me to why I started writing this post in the first place. I was going to recap August. That was it: a simple little update. Somehow we ended up back at Consumers Distributing and MySpace. Welcome to my brain. August itself became one of the busiest release periods we have had, with four releases arriving in sixteen days and each one coming from a different corner of the Coterie.
After Reverend Graye’s July 24 release, Beneath the Shadow, turned chronic pain into a dark, surreal electro-stomp, I needed to get some happiness going on. That song came from waking beneath the weight of pain while still finding enough strength to step into tomorrow. After living in that emotional space, I wanted something that remembered the simpler joy of dancing: those nights when you could get lost in the moment, everybody on the floor was having a great time and there was no drama. Just the music and the room moving together. On August 11, HVH released All the Love.
Then came Pop Art After Midnight on August 20, an HVH project featuring Reverend Graye. I suppose you could call it a concept album, although it did not really begin as one. I have always been fascinated by the odd intersection of pop art, nightlife, underground film, camp, fashion and cultural mischief. The original Pop Art period was before my time, but its influence bled well into the 1980s and 1990s. That was when I was introduced to John Waters films. Later, at a warehouse art rave, they screened Mondo New York; the evening was somewhat enthusiastically enhanced with magic mushrooms, which certainly did not make the film any less bizarre. It sent me looking for more strange cinema from that era, and there were times I genuinely wondered whether I had grown up in the wrong decade.
The album became something more accidental, and more Coterie, than a straightforward tribute to one period. I had songs that simply did not seem to belong anywhere else. The arrangements were odd, the lyrics lived in different worlds and none of them fit comfortably beside the other projects I had written. Eventually I realized what I had: a collection of lonely little songs, each sitting by itself and waiting for somewhere to live. The misfits found one another, which seems fitting. Cheap Lipstick Saints, my tribute to John Waters and the wonderfully filthy, funny and defiant worlds he helped put on screen, probably explains the spirit of the album better than anything else.
Only three days later, on August 23, came HVH’s After Hours. I spend a large part of my own listening time with ambient music and dub house, so that atmosphere naturally seeped into the project. There are super-simple tracks such as Groovin’ and Closer to You, then the intimacy of Till the Morning Light, while Woman in the Dark, Shadow No More and Wild Rose carry much heavier emotional weight. Nearly all the songs I write begin somewhere personal. Sometimes they are memories or observations; sometimes they are experiences I could not emotionally speak about while I was actually living them. Music lets me return to those places differently. There are stories I can tell now that I could not tell then, and that is a large part of what After Hours became: dance music with some bruises underneath it.
And then, on August 27, GLO released Chakras, a project I had wanted to make for years and had started many, many times. Every attempt seemed to drift straight into what I lovingly call the New Age bookstore spa aisle. There is absolutely nothing wrong with soft, flowing, earthy chakra music; we already have an enormous amount of beautiful music like that to choose from. I simply wanted to know why spiritual connection had to sit still. Why could we not have a more upbeat chakra groove with mantras?
Why can’t mantras dance?
I made the album partly for my own body and my actual life. With my buggered-up spine and the bedridden nonsense that psoriatic arthritis can create, I still need to get up and move a little while connecting with my spiritual side and working on those chakras. Sometimes that means standing; sometimes it means chair dancing because standing is not an option. Some tracks stay a pinch closer to traditional mantra and meditative textures, but the larger idea is simple: connection does not have to sound like a spa, and it does not have to sit still.
Looking at the sequence now—All the Love on August 11, Pop Art After Midnight on August 20, After Hours on August 23 and Chakras on August 27—it makes sense that a tidy release recap wandered into a much longer story. Those records did not appear out of nowhere. They came from decades of listening, writing, working, losing things, rebuilding, adapting and following whatever creative curiosity happened to tug at me next.
Which might explain the Arts Coterie Project better than any neat mission statement ever could. None of this happened in a straight line, and most of the worthwhile things in my life rarely have. The tools changed, my body changed, the circumstances changed and naturally the work had to change with them. What remained was the need to create. Some of the work is serious, some of it strange, some of it deeply personal and, admittedly, there is often far too much happening at once. That seems to be part of the Coterie itself. All of those ideas have somewhere to live now, without needing to pretend they belong to the same tidy category. I began with a Candle stereo, my grandparents’ 78s and an appetite for worlds hidden inside sound. Apparently there is now an entire Coterie to put them in. Welcome aboard. We are only getting started.
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