[All editions available to purchase through BandCamp here: https://birchbook.bandcamp.com/album/casting-lines-a-museum-of-memory-vol-iv]

After nearly a decade in gestation, I’m so very relieved to present Volume IV in the Birch Book series of albums: Casting Lines. As alluded to in the subtitle - A Museum of Memory - many of the songs explore the contents, mode and study of personal retrospection: an apparently endless trove of fascinations indulged upon toward a range of signification.

The surreal displaced aesthetic sense experienced when inhabiting a focused memory world - set in stark contrast to the here and now - I find to be among the preeminent peculiar pleasures offered by a capacity for self-reflection. That these discursions may bestow pragmatic epiphanies relevant to worldly navigation, or a salutary temperance upon terrestrial actualities, are but ancillary blessings.

Are we but phantom ships on phantom oceans? May we there settle tragedies never reconciled - reconcile sorrows never settled? To fully engage with this mystery of memory is to probe reality itself: an ontological quest beyond narcissistic self-absorption, toward-paradoxically-a more visceral experience of present circumstance.

Casting Lines has been lovingly adorned with a collection of enlarged perspectives from the illustration A Museum of Memory by Maria Gordon, which was specially designed with themes from the songs herein.

Featuring violoncello by Michael Palzewicz & Eric Alterman.

Published in a variety of editions in co-ordination with Infinite Fog Productions.

As with previous editions of Birch Book, Volume IV accommodates many compositions tending towards the mildly autobiographical.