The rumors are true (or, how one thing becomes another)

I’ve seen the headlines. The rumors are true—or so it seems.

For the past few years, I’ve been working inside the strange world of a harras—a cycle of surreal and absurd poems that slowly expanded into a book, an album, and a short film. The project has always been about change, so in some ways it feels inevitable that the music itself would eventually transform as well.

Today I’m releasing crossmyheart (a harras reworks), a remix album built from the original vocal recordings but radically reimagined musically. The result moves through ambient atmosphere, industrial textures, ceremonial rhythms, and flashes of pop energy—what I’ve started to think of as something like synth-pop poetry.

The project began almost by accident. Before the original a harras album was even released, my long-time collaborator Michael Harren created a remix of the track “suspension.” Hearing that poem inside a completely new musical environment made me realize how open the material really was. What started as the idea for a single remix gradually expanded to an EP and then a full album of reinterpretations. Dudgrick Bevins joined the project with two powerful remixes of his own, Harren contributed a second piece, while I created the rest.

For my part, I didn’t approach the reworks as simple alterations of the originals. They felt more like composing entirely new pieces from within the same creative space. My composition process is improvisational—I arrange and rearrange until something interesting reveals itself. Whether it’s a brand new work or a reimagining of something older, it ultimately comes from the same place and the same creative drive.

One of the album’s defining tracks, “crossmyheart,” was created late at night while I was staying in New Orleans. I spent my days wandering through the Garden District and the French Quarter, absorbing everything there is to see there—but also thinking a lot about death and ritual, since I was in the city for a funeral. At one point, I toured a historic home that had dressed the rooms according to nineteenth-century mourning customs. All of that imagery and atmosphere stayed with me.

One night, instead of winding down after a long day, the music poured out of me with a force that felt almost physical, like the nearby rolling Mississippi. Rivers have always been important to me, and spending time near that great river—feeling its power and its history—I couldn’t help but imagine that the watery world of the horses from a harras knew it too. I’ve crossed that river only a handful of times in my life. On this night, blocks away from it, I crossed my heart. And it was then that the vision for this album was finally clear.

In some ways, this project spans a very long timeline. The earliest poems that eventually became a harras were written in 1998. At the time, I could never have imagined that decades later they would evolve into albums, collaborations, a film, and now a remix record that pushes the material into entirely new sonic territory.

If you’ve heard the original album, you may recognize fragments of its sound and atmosphere here. But you don’t need to know the earlier work to enter this world. The album stands on its own—an alternate path through the same landscape.

Transformation has always been at the heart of the work. It feels fitting that the work itself keeps transforming.

For the record, whatever version of the story you’ve heard, crossmyheart (a harras reworks) is available now. The original a harras album, film, and book are also available if you’d like to explore the project from the beginning.