Daniel Noah Miller is asking the big questions. The singer-songwriter and instrumentalist, spent the last few years connecting back to himself. The years following the onset of the pandemic saw Miller profoundly alone and dealing with a myriad of turbulent life changes: a cross-country move, a breakup with a long-term girlfriend, his father’s passing.

With the backdrop of a newly-isolated reality, Miller held space for his grief. He dove into experimentation, working in different modes of art-making like photography and poetry, while spending time with family in Panamá and working on the bones of what would become a new artistic chapter after making a a name for himself as a founding member of alternative duo Lewis Del Mar. Eventually making his way to L.A., Miller sat alone in his apartment with a guitar and an overflow of emotion. So began the grueling work of alchemizing grief into art.

Miller found inspiration and solace in ambient music and Brazilian psychedelia, from Milton Nascimento’s Clube Da Esquina to the works of Steve Reich, Emahoy Tsegué’s Ethiopiques and William Basinski’s seminal album-series The Disintegration Loops. Finished on 9/11 in New York, Basinski dedicated the project to the victims. This now-classic ambient work was created by way of recording deteriorating cassette tapes played until full of crackles and gaps of sound. Inspired by Basinski’s experimentation, Miller opened cassette tapes with a razor blade, creating four second loops that he then sampled back into the music.

This technique created the cinematic drone that pervades the background of Disintegration. Miller’s solo debut alchemizes a fractured reality into his most personal record, layering the spliced tape loops on top of pared-down drums, acoustic guitar, experimental piano runs, and spacey saxophone breaks, all guided by Miller’s emotive and sultry delivery. The album is an exploration into the core of sound, and into the complex emotional realities of existing in an increasingly isolated world.
“I decided to create tape loops for this album to create ambiance, and it blew the doors off of what I thought [this record] could be,” says Miller. “I was trying to imbue this record with the idea of disintegration. There's a lot of outdoor ambiance on it: not birds chirping, but air, what it sounds like to be in the mountains and still hear the traffic from the I-5 [in Los Angeles]. A lot of the writing was improvised. I was just really sad, in a deep space after touring and living heavy. I came out of that pretty crunched, and I really needed some time.”
The record was largely made analog, with the sound of the four-second loop produced from spliced cassettes sampled back onto itself and eventually being mastered digitally. The experimental technique adds a dramatic backdrop to an album full of heartbreak (“Agnes”, which ends in the crackle of fireworks), pleas for gentle vulnerability (moving guitar track “Opening Me”), and attempts to heal from the past (wrenching album closer “If There’s Time”). By going back to basics, and bolstered by a collaboration with producer Jack Hallenbeck, the experimental hum that makes up the heartbeat of Disintegration allows for a wide-spanning sonic exploration to take place.

Time, and what that it erodes, has been a constant theme for Miller since his Lewis Del Mar days. On Disintegration, time is a marker of endings, a signifier of the eventual dissolution of relationships and familial structures as everyone walks their own path. The frenetic energy of youth disappears as we age; hotheadedness cools to acceptance with a sigh. This is an album of contrasting emotions, of fragmented and earnest reflections on picking up the pieces. Songs like “Sweet James”, writhing with drums and subdued anger, often collide with a desire to forgive and turn a new leaf while acknowledging that everything is forever changed: “But I forgive you for/ The way you talk / Forgive the mess you make / I forgive you but / We’ll never be the same,” Miller croons, resigned but looking straight ahead.

Disintegration is a product of profoundly contemplative solitude, but it does not seek to drown in tragedy. Instead, it extends a hand toward the future, not so much offering concrete hope as it does a chance to pause and process, to grieve and to heal while looking toward tomorrow. These songs exemplify the work of getting to a better place after personal cataclysm. Through Miller’s impressionistic approach to writing and making music, we are urged to think about the synapses, the pieces that make up the big picture, the shards and fragments of a life.
“We're into that era where everything is being torn down,” says Miller. “It's been a long, slow push towards a lot of the things that we had trust and faith in completely eroding.”

Cautious optimism is likely what has kept us alive after these past few years, a feeling Miller dilutes so well. We haven’t talked about how hard it has been, facing impending climate apocalypse after a global pandemic that has changed the ways we relate to one another. It’s existential and personal as the little daily challenges, as deeply cutting as personal tragedy. Still, we cling to magic, to love, new connections, the opportunities life brings when we continue. The rollercoaster keeps going. The Earth keeps spinning. From disintegration, green life still grows.

Flo Petite grew up in a small town in Maryland, making way for a type of angst that only lives on backroads and in the bedrooms of teenage girls. Being homeschooled, she had a lot of time to spend creating music and developing her creative side. It being the early ages of the internet she spent a lot of time soaking in Youtube videos of her favorite singers and performers; Courtney Love and Kathleen Hanna being the main two that she admired for their brash and unapologetic style. Being able to stand tall in a male dominated scene while honoring feminism was something that massively inspired her. At 17, she recorded her first EP ‘Soft Wrinkled Feelings' with her ex-boyfriends brother while she was visiting his family in Tennessee over the summer. She would channel much of the aforementioned angst into this project, touching on topics such as existentialism and identity, drug-use, love, sexism, female pleasure as well as loss and grief over failed friendships and first heartbreaks. She would then release it later into her 18th year, beginning to gig out more and promote her new work. The Frederick News post wrote,“If you aren’t charmed by Flo Petite’s “Soft Wrinkled Feelings,” you need to check your pulse because chances are, you aren’t living.” Digging her claws deep into the DIY scene spanning along the East Coast, she secured her place in the scene as one of Maryland’s finest. After a few years of releasing odd-ball singles and touring the up and down the East Coast subsequently followed by the onset of COVID-19, Petite took a step back from the thing that had consumed much of her time and identity and took a break to pursue academia; finishing with her degree in English Literature & Media Studies from the University of Maryland in the spring of 2023. It wasn’t until she stepped through the doors of Onle Vibez, a performance space formerly located in College Park, MD that she realized what she could do with her music and the unique talent she had not just musically, but to connect with others. During her time at university, she fell back into an artists community and rekindled her love of music. She made her debut back onto the scene in 2023 with her single, “kelsey’s car” - a song she wrote as an apology to her friend after a night out. She’s active in the DMV artist scene and is currently working on her debut album.