Binary Ghosts are the digital remnants we leave behind: the facebook graveyard, twitter like-bots posting in perpetuity -- the infinite databases of pictures, videos, and sounds. When so many clippings of our identity are digitized, it is possible they can take root and grow their own lives with a little watering from those who remain.

The inspiration for this record came after a strings of deaths. Grief is expected, but what I didn’t expect was the unique way the grieving used digital mediums to express their grief.

A few months after my grandmother passed, I would intermittently get likes on my instagram from her account. It was both incredibly unnerving, but also comforting. It ended up being a relative who had her old iPad and was nostalgically drifting through her account.

In another case, a close friend passed after a long and difficult battle with cancer. To this day, his parents keep his memory alive by regularly messaging and posting on facebook as him… refusing to let his account to go “in memoriam,” doing everything possible to continue the legacy of their kind and valiant son.

In my case, I’m making this record. When my mother passed at 57 from Alzheimer's, she left behind a basket of cassettes. The recordings contained hours of her rehearsing, running scales, vocal lessons, writing, covering. As I listened through them, I began to think about how these sounds were sort of extensions of her memory.

Inspired, I sampled her scales and created a digital instrument. The piano sounds on the record are those of my brother and I “playing” her, playing piano. Similar to how the others performed memories on social media, I was performing the memory my mother.

Binary Ghosts is an exploration of this phenomena. By sampling my mother, and other friends who have passed, I am attempting to collaborate with their memories, to continue their legacy, and hopefully, to bring light to the horrible illnesses that took them so early.

All David Slowing's proceeds from Binary Ghosts will go to benefit Alzheimer’s, Hodgkins lymphoma, leukemia, and congenital heart disease research.

I never imagined myself believing in ghosts. My last record, Binary Ghosts, was about ghosts of the digital yet tangible kind; remnants from our lives that we leave behind on the internet. After a fairly culty religious upbringing, I shunned most ideas of the supernatural.

In 2019, my wife and I bought a small Lutheran church in upstate New York that was built in 1856. It’s now a house, but retains the spirit of its previous life… and I mean that figuratively and literally.

After a few months with it, it became clear that the place had… a vibe. Friends reported mysterious strumming of left out guitars in the night, pitter patters, and all sorts of strange noises.

Myself, I always felt a strange indescribable presence there. It motivated me to treat it with respect and reverence. Yes, we were new owners turning it from a church into a vacation house, but we were also caretakers of this building that had outlasted generations.

On March 11th of 2020, our daughter Cecilia was born in New York City. That was also the day that Covid-19 was declared a pandemic, SXSW and the NBA were cancelled, and San Francisco went into lockdown. With a newborn in the epicenter of the largest pandemic of the last century, we fled upstate to the church and found refuge in its walls.

It was a tumultuous time; navigating not only being new parents, but also an unprecedented health crisis, inability to access familial support, and juxtaposing comfort and the insanity of living in essentially a giant reverberant room for the first months of our daughter’s life.

The church was both a blessing and a prison. Every thought of thankfulness was second guessed by a feeling of entrapment and loneliness. Every argument was tempered by gratitude to have a safe harbor for our new family.

Eventually, we uncovered our path forward and moved to Austin, TX in July of 2020 to establish a new life. In May of 2021, we returned to the church for a month to enjoy spring in New York, and pay a visit to the place that had played such an important role in our lives.

For a while, I knew the placed needed some sort of instrumental centerpiece. As soon as we arrived, I purchased a reasonably priced Chickering baby grand from the 70’s just outside of New Paltz. After I got it home, I taught myself to tune pianos via YouTube videos. Got it sounding quite beautiful, especially in the unique space. I could tell the spirits were pleased.

In the month that followed, I recorded “Divinations of the Taghkanic” on that piano in that space. The sounds on the record are the sounds of redemption, spring, renewal, and realignment. We and the spirits communed to turn what was most recently an immensely difficult place for our family, into a place of inspiration and beauty once again.

No, They Dream of Us is an answer to the question Phil K. Dick begged in 1968. It's a lullaby, the warm whispers of the artificial, putting us to sleep for reasons both benevolent and devious.

The album is inspired by the work of avant garde composers like Glass, Riley, Vangelis, Roedelius, and most heavily, Steve Reich. It was produced as a collaboration between producer David Plakon (Bedstudy, Wild Child, You Blew It!) and Artificial Intelligence. Using Google's Machine Learning tool TensorFlow, David fed the neural net pieces of work, which it then learned from to produce new melodies and rhythms. He then edited, reconstructed, and performed that output to form the final pieces.

The voices on the record are that of Amazon's Polly -- the voice synthesis engine behind Alexa. By programming Alexa via Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML), the AI is able to communicate to the listener. Then, David processed the output in a variety of ways, including using vocoders and autotune to stylize the voice.