Shared by @futuretrees
Future Trees: Notes on a Sanctuary
There's a project I started in 2021 called Future Trees. For a long time I didn't talk about it much. It was music, mostly. Piano tracks, ambient sketches, experiments that lived somewhere between cinematic and uncertain. But it was also more than that, which is why I'm circling back to it now.
Future Trees was my coming-of-age. It was the sanctuary where my strange self was allowed to exist without apology, the place I went to figure out who I was becoming. The name itself feels heavier to me now than it did at the time. I was planting future versions of myself and letting them grow without any expectation about what they'd turn into.
If I had to compress what Future Trees meant in one word, the word would be confidence. Not the loud kind. The quieter kind: trusting your own voice when no one is listening yet, and trusting it enough to keep showing up.
The center of gravity was always the piano. I'd sit down and let something move through me. The tracks I made carried what I couldn't articulate any other way: the build of a chord at the 0:08 mark resolving into something I didn't know how to say in words. The push and pull of dynamics, leaving space to breathe, letting the final chord decay until it cut itself off. Listening back, I can still hear the version of me that wrote those.
Future Trees was always a business too. I wanted the thing I loved to feed me, and the friction of the real world had other plans. When the project didn't make enough money, the failure didn't just hit the bank account. It hit my self-image. Tying your identity to your income is a particular kind of risk, and when the math stops working you don't just lose a project. You shelve a piece of yourself.
I stopped making music shortly after. I used to wonder why. I think part of it is that Future Trees did what it was supposed to do. The scaffolding had built the house. I'd grown into the person I was reaching toward, and I could express the same strange self more directly through code, through systems, through the companies I went on to build. The music had served its purpose.
But you don't lose the part of you that needed the sanctuary in the first place. You just stop visiting it.
I bought futuretrees.music. I've rebuilt the foundation, started migrating old content out of Bandzoogle, and I'm treating it as a canonical home for everything I never released. The aesthetic I keep coming back to is nature meeting cyberpunk: iridescent forest greens, moss, glowing teal against deep charcoal. Solarpunk imagery. Cybernetic trees wired into circuitry and solar panels. Future Trees Lab as a sandbox for AI music experiments, creative writing, and whatever else wants to come through.
I'm not trying to recreate the financial pressure that broke it the first time. That's not what this is for anymore. I'm visiting the lab to see what's still mine when the expectation of a livelihood is taken off the table.
There's a lot of unreleased material in the backlog. Stems, Ableton racks, piano takes, sketches that never made it past a working file. Some of it is going to make it onto the new site. Some of it probably won't, and that's fine too. The point isn't volume. The point is that the door is open again.
If you'd asked me in 2021, I would have said Future Trees is a music project with a website. If you asked me today, I'd say it's a record of the person I had to become, and a space I'm finally tending to again from a place where I'm allowed to just make things.
I'm building it in the same way I've built everything else: pragmatically, with the tools I trust, and with the long view that anything worth keeping deserves a home you actually own.
futuretrees.music is that home. Slowly, intentionally, on my own terms this time.