1996: A Year of Firsts

Although my writing on this site mostly covers the digital releases I’ve been doing since 2022, technically my releases go back to 1996 when I completed and released my first instrumental composition: a classical guitar piece that was at first untitled, then went through various names, and then finally ended up being titled “January 1996 in the Botanical Gardens of Oxford.” I wanted the piece to be a living document that contains the memory of my trip to Oxford University in England. In the 1990s, I released it in the sense that I had cassette tapes of it made (given as free gifts at the time rather than selling them) and I performed it publicly — the old-fashioned analog ways of doing things before the new millennium brought us this lovely little Matrix we all inhabit together now.

Its composition was at least partially shaped and inspired by…