* cowTools *

book from Holly, A Strange and Wonderful Time by Tom Maxwell 5/25/26

Since I've been home from school I've been reading this book my dear friend/bandmate/roommate gifted me about the Chapel Hill music scene. As I read the book I'll be adding songs by artists mentioned in the book to this playlist! check it out!

bovine implements EP deepdive 5/11/26

My first EP, bovine implements, will be out this friday, and you can give it a listen/download on my bandcamp. I wanted to give a little background on each of the tracks on here. The EP kind of serves as exposition to what my discography will be going forward, its my first long-form release as up until now I've only put out singles. During my time in college I have experimented with many different sounds and now in my third year I'm settling into what my band's sound is. This EP pays homage to the time I spent with my nose in a daw, just trying to figure things out and make weird noises. I have lots of newer songs that exist more naturally in rooms than in a daw and I'm really looking forward to releasing that stuff, but I wanted to have the oddball chapter of noisy folk stuff released to contextualize my arch as a songwriter and producer.

Track one and track seven (bovine implements and little guy) are a larger track cut into two shorter interlude tracks. During my sophomore year, I had my computer totally die on me, and as I didn't have a strict backup regimen at the time I lost most of my project files. The track that makes up songs 1 & 7 on the Ep, is one of the only things I was able to salvage from that experience. Track 2 (trick of the light) is a song I wrote near the end of my Sophomore year, it is similar to Teacher (track 6), as I wrote and recorded both of them in one sitting, only adding small additions after the fact and going through multiple mixes each. Track 3 (care for you still) is a song I wrote and recorded mostly in my room in North Carolina, with the exception of the drums which I recorded at school with Ben Cuomo. Track 4 (shortwave) is a chaotic maximalist and quirky song that was an evolution of the first song I wrote at school. Ben Cuomo and I put a ton of time and work into it, and its a crowd favorite when we do it live. Track 5 (Wally's barn) is a song I wrote the summer before my Junior year about a time my dog ran acres away to a cow pasture and how the younger me was terrified when it happened. I wrote and recorded track 6 (teacher) in one sitting but then agonized a bit over if it was finished or not, its one of my faves and feels to me like a character song, as if i'm writing from a point of view other than my own. I touched on track 7 a bit, but I want to shout out my freshman year friend group, there was a version of this song where we all contributed a verse or section, I kept the abbreviated version as I liked the messy and noisy bounce that survived my laptop dying. Track 8 is the song I most recently wrote/recorded. When I decided that this EP was going to be my weird Daw project, I wanted the final track to be an explicit representation of that idea. My friend Owen and I worked on this one together, but it went through dozens of iterations. I finally got it to a place where it was wrong in a lot of ways I liked, and any of the directions I could go with it after that just seemed unnecessary, it was already its own beast.

I hope you will check the project out! it is available on bandcamp and will be on streaming this friday May 15th!

shortwave release 7/31/25

i put out a new cowTools song on my birthday! Huge thanks to Ben Cuomo , he brought so much life to the song with co-production and mixing! Also many thanks to Wendy Murphy for the cover/merch art!!!

archives and gratitude 3/18/25

i have spent a good amount of time trying to get the gallery page on this site looking semi presentable. not sure if i have too much of a natural talent for ui, but its coming along.

i keep being reminded of how great the people i share space with are. been listening to a lot of my friends' music recently and it has brought me so much joy and gratitude to get to share my time with these people. do me a favor and go listen to see you round sattelites by Clementine's Private Army. i'm going back to north carolina this coming saturday and im super excited to see my good friends and my dog too. hope to catch up on some reading while down south. current reads are the internet does not exist, a collection of writings published in E-Flux journal about the internet and computer culture. i also started reading the master and margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov. so far its really kept my attention, though i struggle to keep track of all of the eastern european names.

receipts and expanding ephemera cesspools 3/12/25

coolness when established upon social gravity is a toughie, but finding things neat is the coat rack i leave my hat on. how i mark my days. cause i remember what i was listening to when x event occured, finding doodles on my old notes restores my sense of self. what did i think was cool enough to draw on the side of my notes about jane eyre in AP Literature in high school? that type of thing means a lot more than i thought it ever would.

anywho... i've been really into collecting ephemera recently, taking pictures of things that stick out to me in day to day life. is that making memories or holding onto the past or neither? it doesn't really matter. anyway, i recently picked up a kids camera that prints onto printer paper (dont tell me to google the health ramifications of excessive contact with receipt paper). i was inspired by Karly Hartzman of Wednesday and her website prisondivorcebombshell.com to get the thing, and i'm glad i did. i've already taken portraits of my buddies that i cherish and am sure to collect a bunch of awesome photo memories this way. i think i'll start pasting them in my journal as a means to remember what i get up to.

prints made with receipt paper camera — self portraits in grids, birria in tarrytown, deodorant with sticker.

cute monkey with grape 3/9/25

i dont really know what people do with blogs usually, but i'm using this as a public journaling/archival/mind-dump zone. I'm here at SUNY Purchase, working on this website has really been a joy for me, also an obsession. I hope people visit it and find something in it they like. I'm really quite happy with my your daily bread poem generator. It's a project I did for a new media class and it uses seeding to generate a new poem from a large array of poem bits I have written every single hour.