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.