It’s been a while since I’ve written a proper update here.
That seems to happen to me. I get busy creating things, one idea leads to another, and eventually I realize that I’ve been so occupied doing the work that I forgot to write about the work.
The funny thing is, I certainly haven’t been quiet.
If anything, the past year has probably been one of the busiest and most creatively productive periods of my life.
The Music Just Kept Going
When I last wrote extensively about the music, creating songs had become almost a daily practice. What began as an experiment with AI-assisted music had grown into something much more personal—a way to explore ideas, memories, philosophy, humor, ordinary moments, and questions I probably couldn’t express quite the same way through writing alone.
That process never really stopped.
There are now hundreds of songs in the Riven Waters catalog, and when I look back through them, even I’m a little surprised by how much ground they cover.
Some are rock songs. Some wander into electronic music, folk, blues, funk, ambient soundscapes, strange hybrids that don’t really belong anywhere, and occasionally something that sounds like it wandered in from another universe.
I’ve stopped worrying very much about genre.
The song usually tells me what it wants to be.
And lately, I’ve been enjoying that process more than ever.
Somewhere Along the Way, There Were Albums Too
One thing I haven’t written much about here is that the music has also grown into a fairly large collection of albums.
There are quite a few of them now, and they’re available across the major streaming platforms.
Looking back, I think of the albums less as formal releases and more as markers along the trail. Each one captures a certain stretch of time—what I was thinking about, what I was experimenting with, and sometimes what I was working through personally.
My most recent album, Lost in the Sound, is probably the one I love most right now.
It covers a lot of territory, musically and emotionally, and I think it represents where the whole Riven Waters project has arrived after all of this experimenting. There are reflective songs, strange songs, heavier songs, philosophical songs, and songs built around very ordinary moments.
In some ways, the title says exactly what has happened to me.
I’ve gotten lost in the sound.
And I’ve been perfectly happy there.
The album before that, The Being I Feel, is different.
That one is much more personal.
It moves loosely through my life, beginning around my birth and early childhood and then traveling through different periods, memories, relationships, experiences, questions, and changes along the way.
I wouldn’t call it a literal autobiography.
It’s more like an emotional autobiography.
Some memories become songs. Some become impressions. Some get compressed into a few lines. Some things are probably more about how an event felt than exactly how it happened.
But taken together, the album creates a kind of musical path through a life.
That project meant a lot to me because there are things I can say through music that I would probably never sit down and write as a traditional memoir.
A song gives you somewhere else to stand.
You can tell the truth without having to explain every detail.
Where the Music Is Right Now
One of my more recent songs, “Don’t Put Your Coat On,” surprised me.
Originally, I imagined it being faster and more upbeat. Instead, it developed into something slower and more intimate, built around piano, a scratchy acoustic guitar, and vocal harmonies.
I could have kept pushing it toward my original idea, but I’ve learned something through making all of this music:
Sometimes the song has a better idea than I do.
Another recent track, “This Moment Is Enough,” grew out of one of the themes I keep returning to—the strange difficulty we humans have simply existing in the moment we’re already in.
We spend so much time replaying yesterday or rehearsing tomorrow that we can miss the only moment we’re actually experiencing.
Then there was “Twenty Feet At A Time,” inspired by something as ordinary as driving through heavy fog.
When you can only see twenty feet of road ahead, there isn’t much value in worrying about what’s half a mile away.
You deal with the twenty feet you can see.
Then the next twenty.
It started as a song about driving in fog, but like many of my songs, it became something a little larger along the way.
That’s probably one of the things I enjoy most about songwriting.
An ordinary experience can suddenly become a metaphor.
Some Songs Get Strange
And I mean that affectionately.
I’ve also been experimenting with darker electronic music, unusual vocal treatments, industrial rhythms, vocoders, atmospheric guitars, layered female harmonies, jam-band structures, orchestration, acoustic instruments, and sounds I wouldn’t have thought to combine a year ago.
“The Way Through” became this strange, dark, almost futuristic electronic club track.
“Standing on the Platform” moved in an entirely different direction, built around the image of waiting for a train and developed into a loose, improvisational jam.
“Water Plasma Light” went somewhere else again, exploring an idea I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately: whether water, plasma, and light might represent something much more fundamental about life, matter, and consciousness.
I don’t necessarily write songs because I already know the answer.
Quite often I write them because I don’t.
Music has become another way for me to ask the question.
The Process Has Changed Too
The way I make the music has continued to evolve.
The AI music tools are becoming increasingly sophisticated, but I’ve never been especially interested in pressing a button and accepting whatever comes out.
For me, the interesting part is the collaboration and experimentation.
I work on the lyrics, restructure them, throw things away, rewrite entire sections, experiment with sound descriptions, generate variations, listen, adjust, and repeat.
Once I find the version that feels right, the work often continues in Logic Pro, where I can separate the stems and work with the vocals, guitars, bass, drums, effects, EQ, compression, dynamics, and overall mix.
Sometimes that takes longer than generating the song in the first place.
And occasionally I’ll spend hours making tiny adjustments that most people will probably never consciously notice.
But I notice.
That’s part of the fun.
Music Hasn’t Been the Only Rabbit Hole
While all of this has been happening, I’ve also been bouncing between several completely different projects.
I’ve been experimenting with 360-degree photography and immersive environments, thinking about how large real-world spaces might eventually be reconstructed into explorable digital environments rather than traditional point-to-point virtual tours.
I’ve also been researching biochar, mycelium, unusual composite materials, plasma processing, and some rather unconventional ideas involving porous materials and how their microscopic structures might be used.
Naturally, that research somehow turned into ideas for a science-fiction story.
And then a game.
Because apparently my brain doesn’t know when to leave well enough alone.
I’ve also continued exploring consciousness, physics, dreams, perception, artificial intelligence, creativity, and the strange territory where science, philosophy, and spirituality occasionally bump into each other.
I don’t claim to have answers to most of these things.
I’m simply curious.
And curiosity has probably been the common thread running through nearly everything I’ve created.
So…I’m Bringing the Blog Back
Rather than trying to cram the past year into one enormous post, I think I’m going to do something different.
I’m going to work backward.
I’ll start with some of the newest music and periodically revisit songs and albums from the past year that still stand out to me—music with interesting stories behind it, unusual experiments, unexpected results, or ideas worth talking about.
Some posts may be about the lyrics.
Some may be about how the sound developed.
Some may be about an entire album and why those songs ended up together.
Some might simply be about what inspired a song in the first place.
And occasionally I’ll wander away from the music entirely, because if you’ve spent any time on this website, you already know that’s going to happen.
There are far too many songs to cover them all.
That’s actually a pretty nice problem to have.
So instead of trying to document everything, I’ll share the ones that still make me stop, turn up the volume, and think:
*Yeah…I’m glad I made that.*
After all this time, I think that’s probably the best reason to keep creating.
—Riven Waters
Relationship
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about consciousness, intuition, vibration, fields, and the strange question of what reality actually is underneath everything we see.
Not because I think I have the answer.
I don’t.
I actually find the uncertainty to be part of the fun.
I recently watched an Astrum video proposing a new “theory of everything,” and it sent me down one of those familiar rabbit holes. That led into thoughts about spacetime, consciousness, near-death experiences, Donald Hoffman’s ideas about perception, Tom Campbell’s consciousness model, cymatics, frequency, resonance, and whether the things we experience as solid objects might really be persistent patterns within something much larger.
And somewhere in the middle of all of that, something clicked.
I had already written the song.
Relationship.
It’s the title track from my most recent album, and when I originally created it, I wasn’t thinking about physics or trying to explain the universe.
But listening to it again after these conversations, I realized the song had gone much further than human relationships.
There are relationships with other people, of course.
But also with ourselves.
With our past, With truth, With loss, With the body, With the mind, With the earth, With the sky, With the space between us, Even with the air we breathe.
One of the lines says:
“Nothing exists all on its own.”
That line hits differently now.
Because what if that’s actually closer to the nature of reality than we realize?
We tend to think of the world as being made of separate things.
A tree. A stone. A person. A planet. An atom.
But none of those things truly exists independently.
A tree needs soil, water, atmosphere, sunlight, microorganisms, chemistry, gravity, and time.
A human body is made from trillions of interacting cells, electrical signals, chemistry, bacteria, rhythms, memories, experiences, and relationships.
Even an atom exists through relationships among forces, fields, and particles.
So perhaps the important thing isn’t the object.
Perhaps it’s the relationship.
Maybe what we call a “thing” is simply a stable pattern of relationships that lasts long enough for us to give it a name.
That idea has been circling around my thoughts about consciousness as well.
I’ve wondered whether the brain might be less like a hard drive storing consciousness and more like a receiver or transceiver connecting an individual experience to something larger.
Maybe what we call the human aura or field is part of that connection.
Maybe the rhythms of the body — the heart, brain, nervous system, breathing, and countless cellular oscillations — create some kind of coherent local pattern.
And perhaps consciousness is not manufactured inside that pattern but expressed through it.
I don’t know.
None of us really do.
That’s important to say.
Science builds models.
Philosophy builds models.
Religion builds models.
Mysticism builds models.
Mathematics builds models.
And every one of those models is being created from inside the very reality we’re attempting to understand.
Donald Hoffman makes an interesting argument that our perception may function more like an interface than a direct view of reality itself. If that’s true, then even some of our most sophisticated descriptions may only describe what exists within the interface.
Perhaps mathematics itself does.
There could be structures beyond our current mathematics.
Or something beyond mathematics entirely.
That doesn’t mean we stop asking questions.
Quite the opposite. We keep going. We speculate. We test ideas. We listen.
We notice strange coincidences.
We follow intuition when it feels meaningful.
And occasionally several completely unrelated paths seem to meet at the same place.
That happened to me with “Relationship.”
We were discussing the possibility that perhaps reality isn’t fundamentally made from independent objects at all.
Maybe relationship comes first.
Then I listened to the song again.
The chorus says:
“Relationship
That’s all it is.”
Later it changes slightly:
“Relationship
That’s all we are.”
I had to laugh.
Because perhaps I’d already said what I was now spending hours trying to understand.
Maybe consciousness, matter, people, nature, space, time, memory, and everything else aren’t isolated pieces connected afterward.
Maybe connection is there first.
Maybe everything exists because everything is affecting everything else.
And maybe individuality and unity aren’t opposites.
A wave can remain recognizable as a wave while never being separate from the ocean.
A person can be completely themselves while existing entirely through relationships.
Perhaps even consciousness works that way.
Local.
Individual.
And somehow still part of something immeasurably larger.
I’m not presenting any of this as truth.
It’s just curiosity.
And maybe curiosity itself is another relationship — between what we know and whatever lies beyond it.
I’ve had many intuitive moments throughout my life that felt as though they came from somewhere beyond my conscious thinking. Enough of them that I’ve learned not to immediately dismiss them.
Whether someone calls that intuition, subconscious processing, guides, higher consciousness, synchronicity, or coincidence probably depends on their own model of reality.
I’m comfortable leaving the label open.
I just keep noticing.
And creating.
Sometimes a song starts as one thing and later reveals another layer.
Maybe “Relationship” did that for me.
Or maybe I simply caught up with something the song already knew.
Either way, I’m still smiling about it.
Nothing exists all on its own.
Maybe that’s all it is.
Relationship.
– Riven Waters
