Music for Anxiety: How Sound Can Quiet a Nervous System That Won't Stop

I've had anxiety my entire life.

Not the kind that shows up in a crisis and then leaves. The kind that's just there — a low, persistent hum underneath everything. The kind that makes you double-check whether you locked the door. That has you mentally rehearsing a difficult conversation three days before it happens. That occasionally wakes you up at 4am with a vague sense that something is wrong, even when nothing is.

High-functioning, they call it. Which is a polite way of saying it mostly stays out of the way. I've built a full life — a career I love, a studio I love, work that matters to me — and the anxiety has been there for all of it, like a second passenger who doesn't pay rent but you've learned to mostly ignore.

I'm not writing this as someone who has solved it. I'm writing it as someone who has found, over many years of trial and error, a few things that genuinely help. And one of the most consistent, most reliable, most accessible of those things is sound.

Specifically — the right sound, in the right moment. Which took me longer than I'd like to admit to figure out.

What Anxiety Actually Does to the Body

Anxiety isn't just a thought pattern. It's a physical state. The nervous system — specifically the sympathetic nervous system, the one responsible for fight-or-flight responses — is running a little too hot, a little too often. Heart rate slightly elevated. Breath a little shallower than it needs to be. Muscles carrying tension they were never asked to hold.

The mind and body are in a feedback loop. The anxious thought triggers a physical response. The physical response makes the thought feel more credible. Which triggers more physical response. And so on.

The way out of that loop isn't always through the thought. Sometimes it's through the body. And the body is exquisitely responsive to sound — more than most people realize, and more than most people are taught.

Low-frequency tones slow the breath. Slow breath activates the parasympathetic nervous system — the rest-and-digest counterpart to fight-or-flight. Once the parasympathetic system is engaged, the loop starts to break. Heart rate drops. Muscles ease. The thought that felt urgent a few minutes ago starts to feel a little less like an emergency.

This isn't alternative medicine. It's basic physiology. Sound moves through the body, not just the ears. We feel it as much as we hear it. Ambient music, built around slow tempos and resonant low-end frequencies and minimal sudden changes, is — functionally — a tool for nervous system regulation. That's not a marketing claim. It's just what the body does with it.

The Record That Came From a Hard Season

Gentle Breath is probably the most personally revealing thing I've released.

It came out of a period I don't talk about often — a stretch of months where the anxiety was harder to manage than usual. Not a breakdown, nothing dramatic. Just a sustained season of feeling like my nervous system was operating at the wrong voltage. Tired but wired. Creatively blocked in ways I hadn't experienced before. Moving through the days and doing the work but not quite landing anywhere.

I didn't set out to make a record about it. I set out to find some relief. I started going into the studio not with a plan but with a question: what does this feel like, and what does the opposite of it sound like?

What came out was quieter than anything I'd made before. More space between notes. Longer decays. Sounds that didn't resolve so much as gradually dissolve. Music that didn't ask you to follow it anywhere — it just held still and let you arrive.

I called it Gentle Breath because that's what it felt like to make it, and because that's what I hoped it would feel like to hear it. A gentle breath. The kind you didn't realize you needed until you took it.

People reach out about that one more than almost anything else I've made. A lot of them describe the same thing: they put it on during a hard moment and something in them released. Not fixed — released. There's a difference, and it matters.

What the Research Points To

I want to be careful here, because I'm a musician, not a therapist, and anxiety is a serious thing that deserves serious professional support when it calls for it.

That said: there's a meaningful and growing body of research on music and anxiety reduction. Studies consistently show that listening to slow, instrumental music — roughly 60 beats per minute or below, with minimal sudden changes in dynamics or texture — reduces cortisol, the body's primary stress hormone. It activates the vagus nerve, which is essentially the main highway of the parasympathetic nervous system. It measurably slows heart rate and breathing in anxious subjects.

One area that I find particularly interesting is something called the iso principle — a concept borrowed from music therapy, where you match music to the listener's current emotional state first, then gradually shift toward the state you want to create. You don't put on the softest, quietest music when you're at peak anxiety. You start with something that meets you where you are and slowly walks you back.

I didn't know this principle when I started making music. But when I look at the arc of certain Gentle Breath tracks — the way they begin with a little more movement and texture and gradually open into stillness — I recognize something that was intuitive before it was informed. The music knows it needs to earn the quiet.

What I Actually Do

I'm hesitant to give a prescriptive list here, because anxiety is personal and what works for one person doesn't always work for another. But these are the things that have been consistently true for me:

When the anxiety is high, I don't start with silence. Silence at peak anxiety is just a louder room for the thoughts. I put something on — something with a slow pulse, something warm and low, something that doesn't have words for my brain to follow — and I let it run for a few minutes before I ask anything else of myself.

I try to match the music to where I am, not where I want to be. When I'm wired and scattered, I need something that acknowledges that energy before it helps me move through it. Dropping straight into the most minimal, spacious music can feel jarring when the nervous system is running hot.

I use headphones differently than speakers. Headphones when I need the music to really reach me — when I need to be inside the sound rather than in the same room as it. Speakers when I want to change the quality of a space, make a room feel different without focusing on it.

And I try to remember, on the hard days, that this is a tool. A real one. Not a cure, not a substitute for the other work — therapy, medication when it's called for, all the ordinary human maintenance. But a genuine, accessible, always-available tool for turning the temperature down a few degrees.

Sometimes a few degrees is everything.

If You're In a Hard Moment Right Now

I mean this genuinely, not as a segue into a streaming link: if you're reading this in the middle of a hard stretch, you're not alone, and what you're feeling is not a character flaw.

Anxiety is the nervous system trying to protect you, doing its job a little too enthusiastically. It's not a sign that something is permanently wrong with you. It's a signal that needs a response, not a verdict on who you are.

Sound is one response. A good one. One you can access in the next thirty seconds, for free, wherever you are.

Gentle Breath is where I'd point you first, because it came from exactly this place. Made by someone who needed it, for anyone else who does.

[Listen to Gentle Breath here]

drift, sway: a new ambient album for focus, rest, and the slow return of light

There's a particular kind of creative energy that only shows up in winter. I've stopped fighting it. The days get short, the world goes quiet, and something in me starts reaching for the pedalboard.

drift, sway — my new full-length album out April 10th via Nettwerk — came from exactly that place. Ten pieces of ambient music built for the moments when you need the world to slow down: deep focus, quiet reading, the kind of sleep that actually restores something.

How it was made

I kept the approach as minimal as I could. Guitar as the primary instrument. A Boss DD-20 set to a 16-second looper mode as the spine of nearly every piece. From there: the Count to Five, the Meris Mercury 7, the EarthQuaker Devices Avalanche Run. Subtle warmth from a vintage Moog Minimoog and a Korg Polysix drifting in and out at the edges.

Nothing here was overworked. The goal was to capture a feeling — the sensation of breath, of a room settling, of time moving a little slower than usual. I've always believed that ambient music works best when it doesn't announce itself. When it just becomes part of wherever you are.

Two movements, one arc

The album splits into two halves. Drift — six pieces — leans into weightlessness. Guitar textures that float, loops that fold back on themselves, small moments held gently. Sway goes deeper: slower tempos, darker tones, more interior.

Together they move from presence to introspection. From the exhale to the stillness after.

Some of the track titles are rooted in specific memories. Afternoon walk is a quiet ode to daily walks with my wife Hanna. Sandcastles goes back further — summers on the Jersey Shore, the particular impermanence of things you build at the water's edge. Others are harder to name. They came from a season that had some weight to it, and they carry that without making a big deal of it.

Spring felt like the right time to release this. Music made in the dark, offered in the light.

For your next quiet hour

If you work better with something in the background that doesn't pull focus — this is for you. If you read before bed and need sound that doesn't follow you into your dreams — this is for you. If you've just had a hard few months and you're not quite sure how to re-enter the world — honestly, this one's for you too.

drift, sway is out April 10th everywhere. A full-length visualizer drops the same day on YouTube.

🎵 [Stream here] 📺 [Watch the visualizer]

Six Missing is the ambient project of Austin-based composer and sound designer TJ Dumser. His music has amassed over 200 million streams globally and is released via Nettwerk Music Group.

Twelve Years Sober, and Finally Going Back to the Beginning

On recovery, reinvention, and the record that ties it all together.

Today marks twelve years of sobriety for me. And if you'll allow me a few minutes, I want to talk about it — because it's the reason everything else in my life exists the way it does.

Getting sober was simultaneously the hardest and best decision I have ever made. I was terrified, really. I had never genuinely admitted to myself — beyond saying it to take the heat off my previous poor decisions — that I am an alcoholic. And I knew that the moment I truly took ownership of that, there was no going back. Because I didn't really know what life would look like without alcohol, I was petrified of what lay ahead.

But I did it — though not alone. And for that I'm entirely grateful for my family and friends who showed up for me.

The Person I Was

I wasn't a great person when I drank. While drunk, I thought the exact opposite — I thought my life was pretty good, actually. I had a job, I was making music, I had a partner, I wasn't homeless. But it wasn't until I stopped long enough to let the fog lift that I realized just how much I was hindering my own health and my own potential.

Putting down the bottle meant changing everything about how I lived, and that was hard. But not as hard as the first few days.

I had to break down the days into 15-minute segments just to get through them. I had pints of Americone Dream, Red Bull, and GIRLS loaded up on HBO. I'd say to myself: okay, you're not going to have a drink for the next 15 minutes. And when those elapsed — great job, now we're not going to have a drink for the next 15 minutes. Slowly, the days crawled by. But I could see a tiny crack of light peering through. And so I followed that.

The minutes became hours, the hours days. Days became weeks, and weeks months. Before long, I was sleeping better, I had more money in the bank, my digestion improved, I began wanting to exercise, my head un-fogged, and I could begin to see how life might look past this hurdle.

It Didn't Happen on the First Try

I want to be honest about something, because I think it matters: before this day twelve years ago, I tried and failed twice.

So if you're reading this and you're somewhere in that process, thinking I must be failing at this — no, you aren't. Everyone is different. Mine took the classic third time's the charm. Recovery isn't linear, and the attempt itself is never wasted.

The first few years were still really hard even after it finally took. But something had shifted. The crack of light got wider.

What Changed

Soon after getting sober, I started taking full control of my life in ways I never had before. I quit my job and started my own business. I went solo as an artist. I married the love of my life. I moved to a completely new city and bought a house. I signed with a music label. I clocked more hours than ever in a career I genuinely love. The list goes on.

And all of it — every single thing — comes down to that one final night before I quit. The night I was at my absolute lowest. The night I was my worst. The chapter I didn't know how to get past.

I think we try too often to rush past the hard things in life. But if I didn't have that hard night, I would've never made a change. The darkness wasn't a detour. It was the door.

Change is scary. Change is exciting. I'm just really glad I was able to make the change before things got undoable.

Where This Leads — drift, sway

So what does any of this have to do with music?

Everything, honestly.

To mark this anniversary, I'm going back to my roots as Six Missing — back to where it all began, when I was just starting out and fumbling my way through things. Me, my guitar, and some pedals. No armor, no production gloss. Just the thing itself.

drift, sway is a record about honoring your past, celebrating your courage, and looking toward the future. It's the most personally true thing I've made, and I think that's because I finally had twelve years of clarity to make it from.

If you've read this far and you're somewhere in the middle of your own hard chapter — whether that's sobriety or something else entirely — feel free to reach out. I'm happy to chat about any of it. For me, getting sober was the best decision I could've ever made. I don't say that lightly.

Here's to another twelve years.

— TJ (cheers-ing with a seltzer)

What Is Ambient Music, Really? A Guide From Someone Who Lives Inside It

People ask me this more than you'd think.

Not musicians, usually. Regular people. Someone hears a Six Missing track in a coffee shop or on a friend's playlist and something about it stops them — not in the way a song with a hook stops you, but in a quieter way. A settling. And they pull out their phone, look it up, and then wonder: what is this, exactly? What do you call it?

Ambient music. But that answer raises as many questions as it answers.

I've been making ambient music professionally for years now, signed to Nettwerk Music Group, with tens of millions of streams and a Times Square billboard I still can't quite believe was real. And I'll be honest — I still sometimes struggle to explain what it is at a dinner party. Not because it's complicated, but because the thing that makes it interesting is also the thing that makes it hard to describe. Ambient music is, almost by definition, the kind of thing you feel before you understand.

Let me try anyway.

It Started With a Missed Concert and a Delayed Flight

The origin story of ambient music as a genre — at least in its modern form — begins with Brian Eno sitting in an airport in 1978.

Eno had been in a car accident the year before and was recovering in bed when a friend came to visit and put on a record of 18th century harp music before leaving. The volume was too low — barely audible over the rain outside — and Eno was too weak to get up and turn it up. So he just lay there, listening to music that was more suggestion than sound, blending with the ambient noise of the room.

He later wrote that it was a revelation. The music wasn't asking to be listened to. It was simply present. It changed the quality of the air without demanding your attention.

That experience led directly to Music for Airports, released in 1978 — four pieces of slow, looping, largely textureless music designed to be played in public spaces. Not elevator music, not Muzak. Something genuinely different. Eno called it ambient music, and the name stuck.

But the seed had been planted even earlier, by a French composer named Erik Satie, who wrote what he called musique d'ameublement — furniture music — in 1917. Music that was meant to be part of the environment. Music you weren't supposed to actively listen to. Satie reportedly got annoyed when audiences sat down and paid attention to it. That wasn't the point.

The point was presence without demand. It's still the point.

What It Actually Is (And Isn't)

Ambient music is, at its simplest, music that prioritizes atmosphere over structure. There's no verse, no chorus, no build toward a climax. There's usually no melody in the traditional sense, no rhythm you'd tap your foot to. What there is: texture, space, movement that's more like weather than narrative.

It's not background music, though it often gets used that way. Background music is designed to be ignored. Ambient music is designed to be present — available to you at whatever depth you want to engage with it. You can let it wash over you while you work. You can also put on headphones, close your eyes, and find entire worlds inside it. Both are valid. That range is part of what makes it unusual.

It's not the same as lo-fi, though they share some DNA. Lo-fi has beats. Lo-fi has structure. Ambient music doesn't need either.

It's not meditation music, though it's often used for meditation. It's not sleep music, though it's wonderful for sleep. It's not focus music, though it's one of the best focus tools I know. It refuses to be just one thing, which is part of why it's been so hard for the music industry to know what to do with it.

Japan Did Something Different With It

While Eno was developing ambient music in England in the late 1970s, something parallel — and in some ways more interesting — was happening in Japan.

Japanese composers began developing what they called Kankyo Ongaku, which translates roughly to environmental music. The concept was rooted in a distinctly Japanese aesthetic sensibility: ma, the idea that the space between things is as important as the things themselves. Silence not as absence but as presence. Negative space as a compositional element.

Hiroshi Yoshimura released Music for Nine Postcards in 1982 — delicate synth melodies so sparse they feel like light through blinds. Midori Takada's Through the Looking Glass, released a year later, is one of the most hypnotic records I've ever heard, percussion and texture cycling slowly like tides. Satoshi Ashikawa made music where the silence between notes felt as carefully placed as the notes themselves.

This tradition influenced everything that came after it. When I first went deep into Japanese ambient music a few years ago, I found myself listening with a different kind of attention — slower, more patient. It changed how I compose. That philosophy of negative space lives in my music now, even when I'm not consciously reaching for it.

Where It Lives Today

The genre that Eno named and Satie pre-figured and the Japanese environmental composers deepened has grown into something enormous — and also something still largely unknown to mainstream audiences, which is one of the stranger contradictions in contemporary music.

Olafur Arnalds, who works out of Iceland, blends ambient electronics with chamber strings in a way that feels both ancient and completely modern. He's the person who made me realize the Korg PS-3100 — a massive, fully polyphonic synthesizer from 1977 that I now own — could be a vehicle for genuine emotional expression. Watching him speak about that instrument in an interview sent me on a months-long search until I found one, had it put on a plane, and picked it up at the airport like a piece of precious cargo.

Nils Frahm treats the piano like a synthesizer and synthesizers like pianos, collapsing the boundary between acoustic and electronic until it dissolves entirely. Max Richter's Sleep — an eight-hour piece designed to be listened to overnight — is one of the most audacious artistic statements of the last 20 years, and also one of the most genuinely useful. I've covered one of its movements, Dream 1, as a tribute.

And then there are the artists working at the edges of the genre, doing things that don't have names yet. That's where it gets exciting.

What It Means to Me

I came to ambient music through sound design. I spent years — still do, most of the time — working as a re-recording mixer and sound designer for film, television, and advertising. That work is all about how sound creates feeling. How a particular frequency in a particular space makes a body feel safe or uneasy. How the absence of sound can be more powerful than any score.

When I started making music as Six Missing, I wasn't thinking about genre. I was thinking about space. About what it would feel like to be inside a piece of music rather than listening to it from the outside.

The name Six Missing comes from a ghost story — a real one, something that happened to me near a Revolutionary War battlefield in Pennsylvania, a night I still can't fully explain. That experience of the liminal — of something just beyond the edge of perception — is at the center of everything I make. Ambient music, more than any other genre, lives in that space. The space between what you can name and what you can only feel.

That's what it is, really. Not a tempo. Not a structure. Not a mood.

A space.

And an invitation to step into it.

[Explore the Six Missing catalog here]

Ambient Music for Sleep: What Actually Helps (and Why)

There's a particular kind of awake that happens after midnight.

It's not the kind where you're reading or watching something or doing anything useful. It's the kind where your body is exhausted and your mind just won't stop. The ceiling. The same thoughts cycling through again. The sound of the house settling, a car outside, your own breathing suddenly too loud in the quiet.

I know that kind of awake well. Austin summers are brutal and long, and more than a few times I've found myself lying there at 2am, the ceiling fan barely making a dent, thinking about nothing and everything at the same time.

What I've learned — slowly, over years — is that the solution isn't more silence. It's better sound.

Why Silence Doesn't Actually Help Most People Sleep

There's a persistent myth that the best environment for sleep is total quiet. And for a small number of people, that's true. But for most of us, silence isn't peaceful — it's just absence. And an absent room tends to fill up fast with whatever your brain has been meaning to deal with all day.

What actually helps the mind let go is something to rest against. A sound that's present without being demanding. Something that gives your nervous system a signal that the environment is safe and steady, without asking anything of your attention in return.

That's the job description of a good piece of ambient music.

Not all ambient music does this equally, though. There's a real difference between music made with genuine emotional intention and something generated to fill a playlist slot. Your nervous system notices that difference even when your conscious mind doesn't. One has texture, warmth, small variations that feel alive. The other keeps you company the way a refrigerator hum keeps you company.

What the Research Actually Says

I'm a musician, not a scientist — so take this for what it is: a working knowledge of things I've found genuinely useful to understand.

The body has a natural resting heart rate of around 60 beats per minute. Music that moves at or below that tempo tends to create what researchers call an entrainment effect — your nervous system starts to synchronize with the pace of what it's hearing. Slower music, slower breath. Slower breath, slower heart rate. Slower heart rate, sleep.

There's also something called the glymphatic system — the brain's overnight cleaning crew, essentially, that flushes out metabolic waste while you sleep. Deep, uninterrupted sleep is when this process is most active. Ambient music that helps you stay in that deeper sleep longer isn't just helping you rest; it's helping your brain actually repair itself.

And then there's the simpler thing: a steady, soft sound in the room gives your nervous system something predictable to process, which means it's less likely to startle awake at the house settling or a neighbor's car door. It creates a kind of sonic shelter.

What I Reach For

Without Mindis the record I'd point someone to first, if they were trying ambient music for sleep for the first time.

It was made in unusual circumstances — I created the original recordings as a live, improvised score for a ketamine-assisted therapy documentary. No overdubs, no going back to fix anything. Just whatever came out in the moment, in real time, in a deeply altered emotional and psychological space.

What that process produced is something that breathes. There are no hard edges, no moments that suddenly demand your attention, no places where the music announces itself. It moves like water moves — continuous, unhurried, with its own internal logic.

I've heard from a lot of people over the years who use it for sleep. A nurse in Minnesota who puts it on during night shifts. A dad in Australia who plays it for his newborn. A woman going through chemotherapy who said it was the only thing that helped her rest during treatment.

That's not something I engineered. It's something that happened, because the music was made in a genuinely quiet, genuinely open state. I think that comes through.

A Few Practical Things Worth Knowing

If you're going to try ambient music for sleep, here are the things I've found actually matter:

• Start before you're trying to sleep. Put it on 20 or 30 minutes before you want to fall asleep, while you're doing your end-of-day things. Let your nervous system start winding down before you ask it to fully let go.

• Volume lower than you think. It should be just barely there — present without being noticeable. If you're aware of it as music, it's slightly too loud.

• No lyrics. Your brain will follow words even when you're exhausted. Instrumental music sidesteps this entirely.

• Let it loop. Don't let the silence when it ends be the thing that wakes you up. Set a long playlist or let the album repeat.

• Give it a few nights. The first time you try something new your brain is still evaluating it. After a few nights, it starts to become a cue — and cues are powerful.

It's Not a Cure. It's a Companion.

I want to be careful not to oversell this. Ambient music isn't medicine, and if you have serious sleep issues, you should talk to someone who actually knows what they're doing medically.

But as a companion — something to make the space a little softer, the night a little less loud, the transition from the day a little gentler — it genuinely helps. I've experienced it myself, and I've heard enough from listeners over the years to believe it's not just placebo.

There's something worth saying about the fact that the same music that helped people relax deeply enough to process trauma in a therapy setting is the same music that helps a baby fall asleep. That range tells you something about what it actually does — not what kind of experience it creates, but the quality of state it creates. Quiet. Open. Safe.

That's what I'm going for, every time.

[Listen to Without Mind here]

You Don't Have to Beat It — You Just Have to Outlast It

Reflections on ten years of Six Missing, survival reality TV, and why sway: breathing room exists

I want to talk about Alone. But first, let me back up — because that's actually how we got here.

SXSW just wrapped up in Austin, and while I didn't do much by way of events this year, I did get to see two old friends and one new one, which was absolutely lovely. Through chatting with one of my old pals — who had me on his podcast while he was in town (more on that soon) — we realized we've known each other for almost 30 years. How absurd is that? Three decades, and somehow it still just feels like us.

But here's the thread that ties this whole thing together: my other old friend is the one who turned us onto Alone.

The Show

If you haven't seen it, Alone is a survival reality show where contestants are dropped — completely solo — into the wilderness with minimal gear and told to last as long as they can. No camera crew. No producers. Just them, the elements, and whatever they can figure out. Season 11 is on Netflix, and my partner Hanna and I tore through it in about a week.

Reflecting on it together over the past couple of days, something started to crystallize for me.

Some contestants came in trying to dominate — to beat the game, outsmart it, conquer it. Others took a different approach entirely. They weren't trying to win against the wilderness; they were trying to exist with it. To build something sustainable. To make themselves at home in an environment that wasn't designed for them.

And in the end, the one who built the most sustainable relationship to their survival — not the strongest, not the loudest, not the most aggressive — was the one who won.

I feel the same way about my relationship to music and the music industry.

You Can't Beat It

I'm not trying to beat the music industry, because it simply can't be won. The goal posts never stop moving. Streaming payouts shift. Algorithms change. What worked last year doesn't work this year. If you orient yourself around winning that game, you will exhaust yourself chasing a finish line that doesn't exist.

But what you can do is co-exist with it. You can build sustainable workflows and habits and a body of work that allows you to quite literally outlast the other contestants.

There's an old adage: you don't always have to be the best, you just have to outlast everyone else. That's something I've been sitting with a lot lately, as I approach ten years as Six Missing this year.

Ten years. I genuinely can't believe it and also I can completely believe it, because I've never once felt like I was grinding against something. The work feeds me. It always has.

My Version of Alone

My approach to Six Missing mirrors the mindset of the best Alone contestants. Build a shelter, find food, sleep, stay alive, repeat.

For me: shelter is my body of work. Food is the inspiration and motivation. Sleep is still sleep (heh). And staying alive is continually releasing the highest quality work I can — not rushing, not forcing, but never stopping either.

I never grow tired of it. And I think that's where my real advantage lies. Another ten years? I'd do it without hesitation. I'm really only just getting started.

But here's where my version of the story diverges from the show, and it's the part that actually matters most to me.

A lot of those contestants tap out — not because they can't survive physically, but because they miss their people too much. The isolation becomes the thing that breaks them, not the cold or the hunger. And honestly? I get it completely.

Unlike them, I don't have to choose. I get to make this work with incredible artists, collaborators, and listeners who light me up just as much as the music itself does. Every collaboration teaches me something. Every conversation with someone who's actually heard the music changes the way I think about what I'm making.

And that includes you — reading this right now. You showing up here, following along, lending your ears and your time — that's what keeps me wanting to share. That's not a small thing. That might actually be the whole thing.

sway: breathing room

Which brings me to today.

I have a new single out — sway: breathing room — and its existence is pretty much a direct product of everything I just described. It's full circle in the best way: me, sitting with my guitar and my pedals, the way I used to make music when Six Missing was brand new. That intimacy, that simplicity. But sway: breathing room takes it a step further — printed to tape, slowed all the way down, given room to exist without rushing anywhere.

Mmm, tape.

It feels like a breath. Which, given everything, feels exactly right.

If you'd like to hear it, you can find it HERE. And if you haven't started Alone yet — you can thank me later, just as my friend did for us.

Your friend, TJ

Ambient Music for Deep Focus: How Sound Helps the Mind Settle

There are days when the noise inside is louder than anything in the room.

Not the kind of noise you can turn down or walk away from. The kind that sits just behind your eyes — a low hum of everything you're carrying, everything that hasn't found its place yet. On those days, what you choose to listen to isn't a small decision.

I've been making music for most of my life — as a sound designer, a mixer, a composer, and as Six Missing, my ambient project. And I'll tell you: my relationship to what I put in my ears while I work has changed a lot over the years. Not because I went looking for a system, but because I started paying close attention to how certain sounds made me feel, and how some of them quietly made everything easier.

This is what I've learned.

The Brain Doesn't Actually Want Silence

There's a misconception that deep focus requires quiet. For some people, maybe. But for most of us, the absence of sound creates a kind of restlessness — the mind, left in a vacuum, tends to fill it with whatever unfinished thought has been waiting in the wings. Worry. Distraction. The thing you said three days ago that you can't stop replaying.

What actually helps the mind settle isn't silence — it's sound that's present without being demanding. Something to rest against. Ambient music, when it's made with intention, does exactly this. It's not background noise. It's a carefully held space.

What "Made With Intention" Actually Means

Here's where I'd push back gently on just putting on any playlist labeled "focus music." A lot of what gets marketed that way is algorithmically generated — emotionally flat, designed to be inoffensive rather than genuinely useful. It keeps you company the way a blank wall keeps you company.

Music made by a human being, with real emotional intent behind it, does something different. It has warmth. Texture. Small, almost imperceptible moments of variation that your nervous system registers even when your conscious mind doesn't. There's a real difference between music that occupies space and music that creates it.

When I made drift — the first part of my new record drift, sway, which came out last Friday — I was thinking about exactly this. The whole record was built from guitar loops. Improvised, single-take performances run through delay pedals, tape machines, and space echoes, with a Boss DD-20 on 16-second looper mode at the center of it all. Each piece started as a kind of meditation: I'd begin playing, follow the sound wherever it wanted to go, and stop when it felt complete. No overdubs. No going back to fix anything.

What came out of that process was music that breathes. That moves at the pace of thought rather than the pace of a clock. That was always the goal.

The Body Notices Before the Mind Does

Something people often mention when they talk about using ambient music for focus is that the body settles first — shoulders drop, breath slows, the jaw unclenches — before they notice any real shift in concentration. I find that really beautiful, and I think it makes total sense. We're not just brains floating in space. The nervous system is listening too. And when the sound in the room signals that it's safe to be here, something releases.

That's part of why I make music the way I do. I want the listener to feel held by the sound before they've made any conscious decision about it.

A Few Simple Things That Help

Start the music a few minutes before you actually sit down to work. Give your nervous system a chance to arrive before you ask your mind to show up.

Skip anything with lyrics if you're writing or reading — your brain will follow the words whether you want it to or not. Instrumental music sidesteps this entirely.

Match the energy to what you're doing. drift is soft and spacious — it's made for the kind of work that needs unhurried attention. Writing, reading, thinking something through slowly. If your work runs faster, find something with a little more pulse.

And then let it go. The best sign that focus music is working is when you stop noticing it. The goal is presence in your work, not presence in the sound.

A Place to Start

If you've never used ambient music as a focus tool and you want a gentle entry point, drift is a good place to begin. Six tracks, each one a small study in stillness and space. Made slowly, quietly, in a studio in Austin — for exactly this kind of moment.

[Listen to drift here]

Six Hundred Records and a Brain That Finally Feels Better

My love for records started in an attic.

My grandmother's attic, specifically — that particular kind of attic that belongs to a house where a whole family grew up, where things accumulate in layers the way sediment does, each layer a different decade, a different version of people you love. I was digging around up there one afternoon as kids do, not looking for anything in particular, when I found them: my dad's and uncles' old records. Stacked and forgotten.

Led Zeppelin II.Led Zeppelin IV.

My uncle had an old turntable up there — one he'd gotten from the local library, a suitcase-style unit, the kind where the lid folds open and the speaker is built into the top half and the turntable sits in the bottom. It was not a fancy piece of equipment. It was perfect.

I put on Zeppelin IV and heard 'Black Dog' for the first time in my life and everything was different.

Not metaphorically different. Actually different. Something rearranged itself in the way I understood what music could do and what it was for. I was not prepared for the physicality of it — the way the sound came out of that little built-in speaker, the way the room felt. And then there was the object itself. I sat there and held it. Turned it over. Read the liner notes. Studied the sleeve while the music played. I had never spent time with an album before in that way — music and object together, one inseparable experience that rewarded your full presence. The record was still playing and I was completely inside it. There was also the smell. I don't know how to explain the smell of old vinyl to someone who hasn't experienced it, except to say that it is one of the most immediately transporting sensory experiences I know. One inhale and I'm a kid again in that attic with the afternoon light coming through the small window and the whole world rearranging itself quietly.

That was it. That was the beginning.

What Records Actually Are

I want to say something about what made that moment different, because I think it gets at why physical media is not nostalgia. People frame vinyl that way a lot — as a backward-looking thing, a resistance to progress, a sentimental attachment to obsolete technology. I disagree pretty strongly.

A record asks you to be present. It has a Side A and a Side B — at least — which means it has an intention baked right into the format. A shape. A sequence. A beginning and an end that someone decided on deliberately, that you have to honor by getting up, crossing the room, and turning it over. You have to handle it carefully. The ritual of playing a record is, quietly, a practice of attention — and in a world that runs on infinite scroll and algorithmic recommendation and music that plays forever until you remember to stop it, there's something genuinely countercultural about a format that asks you to participate.

I have been participating enthusiastically ever since.

The Completist Problem

I've also been a collector my entire life, which is either related to the record thing or just a separate personality trait that found its ideal expression in it. Baseball cards first. Then POGs — yes, POGs, no apologies. No Fear hats. Power Rangers. And eventually, inevitably, vintage synths and guitar pedals. Whatever the thing was, I wanted the complete set. The gap in a collection isn't a minor inconvenience to a brain like mine. It's a small, persistent hum of wrongness that doesn't resolve until the gap is filled.

Here's the funny thing about record collecting, though: a record collection is never actually complete. That's not a bug. That's the whole point. There's always another pressing you didn't know existed, another record that slipped through, another artist you fell down a rabbit hole for at two in the morning. The collection keeps growing because it's supposed to. The completist in me found a hobby that is, by design, impossible to finish — and somehow that just makes it more fun. I'm not sure what that says about me, but I've made peace with it.

Records and this particular brain wiring were made for each other.

The collection has moved with me from Brewster to Astoria. Back to Brewster. Back to Astoria again — long story, double round trip, it made sense at the time, I promise. Then Austin. Then another home in Austin. The records are always the first thing I pack and always the first thing I unpack. Everything else can live in boxes for a few extra days. The records cannot.

The Rainy Weekend in Astoria

For years I knew what I had, roughly. But roughly is not the same as actually, and the completist in me knew the difference even when I was pretending not to. Which pressing? Which edition? Do I already own the thing I'm currently considering buying? I have gotten that last question wrong in both directions more than once.

One rainy weekend in Astoria I sat down with Discogs and fixed it. I input all of it — around 600 records, give or take, by the time I finished. Cross-referenced pressings. Tracked down matrix numbers. Made notes on condition. It took most of the weekend and I enjoyed every minute of it in a way that probably says something about me as a person.

When I finished, something in my brain genuinely felt better. Like a drawer that had been stuck for years finally sliding closed all the way. There is a particular relief that comes from having something you love properly documented — from taking it seriously enough to give it that kind of attention. My collection existed before Discogs. But it became real on Discogs, in the way that things become real when someone gives them the care of being properly cataloged.

What I didn't expect was how much I'd come to rely on it day-to-day. The ability to pull up my full collection at a glance — to be standing in a record store, see something, and know immediately whether I already own it — is something I didn't fully appreciate until I had it. The number of duplicate purchases it has saved me is genuinely funny. The completist brain does not handle duplicates gracefully. Discogs handles them for me now. I'm grateful every time I open the app.

Solo Dates and The Thing

I used to take myself on solo dates to record stores around New York City. This is something I recommend to everyone — the solo record store trip is one of the great underrated pleasures. No agenda, no one else's taste to negotiate, nowhere to be, just you and the bins and whatever you find.

I had my rotation around the city. But my Everest — the store I'd point anyone toward, the one that is genuinely indescribable to someone who hasn't been inside it — is The Thing in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

I don't know how to explain The Thing. I'll try and fail. It is enormous and overwhelming and completely without pretension, and there is no order to it whatsoever. None. You cannot go in there with a plan, because you will fail. What you can do is surrender to it — give yourself over to the chaos, dig slowly, let the room work on you — and if you do that, the reward is the kind of discovery that simply cannot happen anywhere tidy. I have found things at The Thing that I did not know existed. I have also spent hours finding nothing and left feeling like I'd spent the afternoon well. That is the mark of a great record store.

The Wood Brothers, Loaded, and Ten Years of Looking

Here is the part of this that I think about most when I think about what Discogs actually means to me.

Loaded by The Wood Brothers was one of the first records Hanna and I fell in love to. Not with — to. It soundtracked the beginning parts of our relationship, those early months when everything is new and you don't know yet that you're building something that will last, you just know that the music playing in the room feels like it belongs completely to the moment.

For ten years after that, I looked for a physical copy. In shops around New York. Online. Whenever I was somewhere with a good record store I would check. It had become one of those records — the ones that exist in your mind as slightly mythological, a thing you'd like to have but have quietly started to suspect you may never actually find. You make peace, sort of, with the digital version. You tell yourself it's fine. It is not fully fine.

Then one day, there it was on the Discogs marketplace. I stared at the listing for a long moment and genuinely wondered if it was a scam — it had been so rare, to me at least, for so long that my brain had almost stopped believing it was an obtainable object in the world. I bought it anyway. Heart in my throat a little.

It arrived. It was real. It was in great condition.

Every time I put Loaded on the turntable now, something in me smiles before the needle even hits the groove. Not because of what it cost or how long it took, but because of what it holds — the beginning of something that became the most important relationship of my life, recovered from time and distance and ten years of missed opportunities by a marketplace that takes this stuff as seriously as I do.

I am genuinely grateful to Discogs for that. In a way that might sound disproportionate until you understand what the record means.

The Record I Got to Add

There is one more Discogs moment I want to tell you about, because it felt different from all the searching and cataloging and marketplace browsing.

Without Mind — my record on Nettwerk, built from experimentations writing music for a ketamine treatment session, pressed as a triple LP — went to vinyl. A real, physical object that hadn't existed and then did.

The moment I got to add it to the Discogs database myself — to submit my own release, to give it the same catalog treatment I'd given hundreds of records by artists I'd loved for decades — I sat with that for a minute. Maybe longer than a minute.

Discogs is where records live when they matter. That sounds like a simple thing to say but I mean it exactly. It's where the care lives — the pressings, the matrix numbers, the condition grades, the little notes collectors leave for each other. It's a community built entirely around taking physical music seriously, and getting to place my own work inside it felt like a kind of arrival I hadn't anticipated.

A confirmation that the thing I made was real in the same way that Zeppelin IV was real up in that attic. A physical object in the world that someone might find someday and hold and study and smell and feel something rearrange itself inside them.

That thought genuinely gets to me.

Why Six Hundred

Tom Waits said something — I'm paraphrasing because I can't locate the exact quote — about being excited to marry his partner partly because he knew he was about to inherit an incredible record collection. Or that it was going to double his. Something in that neighborhood. The specifics blur but the spirit of it has always stayed with me, because a record collection is a portrait. It tells you who a person is, what they've loved, where they've been, what they cared enough about to carry with them across distance and time.

Six hundred records is a lot of years. A lot of rooms. A lot of moods and phases and people and places compressed into shelving in Austin that I will rearrange carefully every time we move.

It's also, as I said, not finished. It's never finished. That used to feel like a problem and now it just feels like the deal — like the thing that keeps it alive. There will always be another record I didn't know I needed until the moment I found it. There will always be another copy of something I lost track of waiting on the Discogs marketplace for the right person to come along.

The records are always the first thing I pack. They are always the first thing I unpack.

Discogs is where they live when they're not playing. And for a brain like mine — for a collector who has been one since before he knew the word for it — that is not a small thing at all.

Browse the Six Missing catalog on Discogs + Grab a copy of Without Mind

Listen to Without Mind

I Miss Ask Jeeves

This weekend in Austin we’re getting those beautiful overcast skies that make you want to stay inside and watch movies. You know the kind — the sky is gray, the air is quiet, and suddenly the idea of leaving the house feels completely unnecessary. Honestly, I’m looking forward to it. A rainy weekend, a couch, maybe a blanket, and a good movie is one of life’s simplest pleasures.

Which brings me to something strange I’ve been feeling lately.

I’ve had this sudden urge to buy a Blu-ray player again.

I know, I know. It sounds ridiculous. We live in a world where essentially every movie ever made is floating around in the cloud somewhere, available instantly on demand. But lately I’ve been thinking about physical media again — Blu-rays, CDs, tapes. You already know how I feel about vinyl. There’s something about holding the thing in your hands, sliding it out of a case, placing it on a shelf, that makes the experience feel more intentional somehow.

Maybe that’s why I never really got on board with e-readers. I’ve always been a book person. I like pages. I like margins. I like the weight of a book in my hands. Something about the physical object slows the experience down in a way I’ve always appreciated.

Lately I’ve been wondering if this renewed interest in physical things is connected to how much of life now exists online.

The other day I was scrolling through old photos — as one does — and I stumbled across a picture my mom had sent me years ago. It was our very first computer setup at home. The thing was glorious in that late-90s way: a giant CRT monitor, the beige tower with a CD drive, and a little external desktop microphone sitting on the desk.

I posted the photo on Instagram, and my mom texted me a little while later saying she remembered exactly why she had taken that picture.

It was the first time we logged onto AOL.

When she said that, I swear it felt like someone kicked a soccer ball into my stomach. Pure nostalgia.

Because suddenly I remembered something that feels almost impossible now: the internet used to be a place you had to go to.

You sat down at the computer. You logged on. You browsed around for a while. And then eventually you logged off and went back to the rest of your life.

It wasn’t everywhere.

Some of you reading this probably don’t even remember that era, which is a slightly strange thing for me to realize as I write it. But there was a time when the entirety of human existence wasn’t digitized and living in the palm of your hand. You couldn’t ask a robot to proofread your paper. You couldn’t instantly Google whatever random thought popped into your head.

You had Ask Jeeves.

And boy did Jeeves take his time.

If you wanted to watch a show, you checked the TV Guide and waited for it to come on. If you wanted to hear a record, you put the record on. If you wanted to go online, you physically went to the computer.

Now everything is immediate. ChatGPT this, Google that, ask Siri something. Instagram, Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok — an endless stream of information and noise that follows us everywhere we go.

And don’t get me wrong — I love technology. Truly. Having access to the entire history of recorded music at the press of a button is still something that feels miraculous to me.

But I also think something subtle has changed along the way.

We’ve trained ourselves to expect immediate results. If we try something once and it doesn’t work right away, we assume we’re not good at it. If we can’t master something quickly, we move on to the next thing.

Creativity doesn’t really work that way.

The things that end up meaning the most to us — learning an instrument, making art, building something with care — tend to move at a much slower pace. They require repetition. Patience. Time spent failing quietly before anything good starts to emerge.

I suppose that’s part of why I’ve always been drawn to slower things.

Books instead of screens.

Vinyl instead of playlists.

And, in many ways, the kind of music I make.

Ambient music, at its best, isn’t really asking for your attention in the way so much of modern media does. It’s more like an invitation. A small pocket of space where things can unfold a little more slowly.

Which, now that I think about it, might be why the idea of buying a Blu-ray player again suddenly feels appealing. Not because I need one. But because the ritual itself feels nice to imagine — choosing a film, putting it on intentionally, letting the experience unfold without scrolling or multitasking or checking my phone every five minutes.

Maybe that’s all I’m really chasing.

Not nostalgia exactly.

Just a slightly slower rhythm.

And honestly, that’s probably the same instinct that led me to make the music I make in the first place.

If you’d like to hear the newest piece of that, my new EP drift is out now.

What the Olympics Taught Me About Devotion

Over the weekend, while traveling to visit family, I accidentally watched a lot of the Olympics.

“Accidentally” meaning — it was just on. And I stayed.

I haven’t watched the Olympics in years. Not for any particular reason. They just hadn’t crossed my path. But this time I found myself completely transfixed.

Holy crap.

It is absolutely insane what humans are capable of.

These are people operating in the top fraction of a percent of humanity. Professionals who have dedicated their lives — truly their lives — to something most of us would consider obscure.

I kept turning to my brother-in-law and asking, “How does someone even discover they’re good at something like curling?”

Not just good. World-class.

And then beyond that — how do they love it enough to give themselves to it? To wake up early. To fall. To lose. To repeat. For years.

The drone shots behind the bobsled and speed skating really put things into perspective. That’s where you can feel the speed. The danger. The razor-thin margins between victory and heartbreak.

They are superhuman.

But here’s what actually got me.

I teared up.

Not because of the gold medals.

But because I watched two downhill skiers finish their runs — both completely exhausted, having just given everything they had. The results flashed on the board. One rejoiced. The other was crushed.

And yet — they turned to each other and embraced.

Different countries. Different languages. Years of rivalry.

Mutual respect.

It hit me harder than I expected.

Because underneath all of the flags and national anthems and commentary, what I was actually witnessing was devotion.

Years of quiet, invisible devotion.

Devotion Is Invisible Most of the Time

We only see the podium moment.

We don’t see the 5:00am practices.
The injuries.
The self-doubt.
The repetition.
The years when no one was watching.

It made me think about craft in general.

About anyone who gives themselves to something long enough that it shapes who they are.

As I sat there watching, I felt something quietly familiar.

Not in an ego way.
Not in a “compare yourself to Olympians” way.

But in a “this is what dedication looks like” way.

I’ve been playing guitar since I was twelve years old.

Long before I could really play it.

Long before I understood scales or modes or tone or discipline.

I just knew I was drawn to it. To the way it felt in my hands. To the sound vibrating through wood and air.

I’ve been chasing sound ever since.

Recording in bedrooms.
Looping in Astoria apartments.
Sitting in front of speakers adjusting a reverb tail by half a decibel.
Vintage synths humming in the background.
Field recordings captured on walks.
Sessions where nothing worked.
Sessions where everything clicked.

No medals.
No podium.

But devotion all the same.

The Long Arc of Showing Up

When I think about it, I’ve dedicated my life to sound.

Not in a glamorous way.
In a consistent way.

The kind where you show up whether you feel inspired or not.
The kind where you keep refining your ear.
The kind where you move through burnout.
Through addiction.
Through grief.
Through doubt.

Two months ago today, our sweet Nala passed.

Time since then has felt both instantaneous and eternal.

My brain has been in survival mode.
Just getting through.

And yet — even in that fog — I’ve still shown up to the studio.

Not because I had to.
Not because of an algorithm.
But because it’s what I do.

It’s my craft. It’s my way of processing. It’s my version of training.

Devotion doesn’t always look dramatic.

Sometimes it looks like quietly sitting at a piano and letting one chord ring.
Sometimes it looks like scrapping a mix and starting over.
Sometimes it looks like releasing ambient music without expectation.

Respect for the Ones Who Show Up

Watching those athletes embrace each other reminded me of something simple:

When you’ve given yourself to something fully, you recognize that same dedication in others.

It’s not about winning.
It’s about the shared understanding of what it took to get there.

There’s something deeply human about that.

In a world that feels increasingly divided — politically, socially, digitally — I found myself unexpectedly moved by the simplicity of respect.

Different countries.
Different ideologies.
Same sacrifice.
Same discipline.
Same love of craft.

And it made me think about the creative community, too.

Every artist I admire — whether ambient composers, film scorers, modular synth explorers, or painters — has devoted their life to something intangible.

We may make wildly different sounds.
We may hold different beliefs.
But underneath it all is a shared devotion to making something honest.

We Are All Training For Something

Maybe not the Olympics.

But something.

Maybe it’s parenting.
Maybe it’s healing.
Maybe it’s sobriety.
Maybe it’s building a life aligned with your values.
Maybe it’s simply trying to be a decent human in a loud world.

I think what moved me most was remembering that beneath the noise, we are all training for something.

We are all trying.
We are all tired sometimes.
We are all giving more than people see.

And when we remember that, it becomes a little easier to extend grace.

To embrace instead of divide.
To respect instead of diminish.

Devotion Over Division

The Olympics didn’t make me patriotic.

They made me reflective.

They reminded me that dedication is sacred.
That craft is worthy.
That respect is powerful.

And they reminded me that even in grief, even in uncertainty, even in survival mode — I am still devoted to what I do.

Not because it makes me special.

But because it keeps me human.

And maybe that’s the point.

We are humans.
All going through things.
Trying to do our best.

And if we can meet each other there — in the shared understanding of effort — maybe we’ll be alright.

Synth History Recommends

Being Featured in Synth History Vol. 5 -- Finding My Place

You can read the full Recommends feature here:
https://www.synthhistory.com/post/six-missing-recommends

I wanted to share something that genuinely stopped me in my tracks.

I’m featured in Synth History Vol. 5 — the physical zine — and also on their website as part of their Recommends Series.

That still feels surreal to type.

I first discovered Synth History on a plane, flipping through Volume 2, and immediately felt something click. The care in the layout. The tactile feel of the paper. The depth of the writing. It wasn’t just about synths — it was about why we’re drawn to these machines in the first place.

It felt like finding my place.

Fast forward a few volumes later, and now I’m somehow in actual ink, alongside artists I deeply admire. That kind of full-circle moment doesn’t happen often — and when it does, you really feel it in your chest.

Synth History as a Living Document

What Dan and the Synth History team have built is special. This isn’t gear fetishism or trend chasing — it’s documentation. Culture. Memory.

In a time when so much of music exists fleetingly on screens, there’s something grounding about a printed object that asks you to slow down, sit with it, and turn pages. That philosophy mirrors how I like to work musically — hands on, ears open, patience intact.

Holding Vol. 5 feels like holding a small piece of collective history.

The Recommends Series

For the Recommends Series, I was asked to list 10–15 studio essentials — instruments and tools that have shaped how I hear, feel, and create.

What I appreciated most about the prompt was that it wasn’t about productivity or optimization. It was about relationship.

Two pieces I spoke about in depth were my Korg PS-3100 and the EarthQuaker Devices Avalanche Run — both of which feel less like gear and more like collaborators.

The PS-3100 is big, heavy, temperamental, and already feels like it has a will of its own. It’s been in the shop more than once — and I’ll still never give it up. There’s something mystifying about it that I was actively searching for. The interface invites you to touch it, to play, to mess things up and see where they land. Watching Ólafur Arnalds speak about the PS-3100 years ago made me realize he was talking about synths the same way I do — almost poetically. That moment sent me on a long hunt until I finally found one, had it put on a plane, and picked it up at the airport like a precious artifact.

And then there’s the Avalanche Run.

I don’t say this lightly — that pedal changed the entire course of my musical life. I bought it at Main Drag Music in Williamsburg, and the person ringing me up smiled and said, “Hope you enjoy losing time for three days.” They weren’t wrong.

My first Six Missing release was born entirely out of improvising with that pedal — one long session of me playing with it and it playing back at me. It’s a universe. A texture engine. A collaborator that chews sound into something elastic and strange and beautiful. If I ever had to choose just one pedal to perform with, it would be the Avalanche Run. No question.

Gratitude

Huge thanks to Synth History for including me — both in Vol. 5 of the physical zine and online. It means more than I can properly articulate.

And thank you to everyone who listens, supports, reads, and makes space for this kind of slow, intentional work. None of it exists in isolation.

If you’re into synthesizers, ambient music, or thoughtful creative culture, I can’t recommend Synth History enough. And if you can get your hands on a physical copy — do it. Some things really are better when you can hold them.

You can read the full Recommends feature here:
https://www.synthhistory.com/post/six-missing-recommends

Why I Finally Told the Story Behind Six Missing

For years, people have asked me where the name Six Missing came from. And for years, I’ve danced around it.

I’d say it was a feeling, a phrase that stuck. Something with weight. Something personal.
And all of that is true.

But recently, I decided to share the full story—the real story—behind the name. A story I’ve carried with me since a recording trip in Pennsylvania many years ago. A story that, at the time, shook me to my core and left me wondering what exactly had happened to me in the middle of the night, deep in the woods, far from home.

This week, I released a longform video on YouTube that tells the full ghost story behind Six Missing.
It’s something I’ve only ever shared in fragments—at shows, in interviews, maybe over a drink or two with close friends. But putting it into a visual format, with intention and atmosphere, felt like the right way to honor it.

Because the truth is: I don’t know what happened to me that night.
And I think that’s what makes the story powerful.

The Story in Brief (no spoilers)

I won’t spoil the full video here—if you haven’t seen it yet, I hope you’ll watch. But I will say this:

It happened during a late-night walk back to the cottage where we were staying while recording an album. There was a feeling…
Then silence.
Then cold.
Then something else. Something that felt ancient. Heavy. Not quite malevolent—but not indifferent either.

In the days that followed, I started researching the land. The deeper I went, the more unsettling the connections became. When I came across an old casualty report listing six missing soldiers from a nearby Revolutionary War battle, something inside me clicked.

I knew that name—Six Missing—was mine to carry.

Why I’m Sharing It Now

I’ve always believed that the unknown deserves to be respected, not ignored. Whether you call it spiritual, energetic, ancestral, or just part of the great cosmic mystery… I don’t pretend to have answers. But I try to listen.

And for me, telling this story is a way of listening back.
A way of acknowledging that something happened.
And that maybe we’re not as alone as we think.

Over the years, I’ve shared this story with listeners in casual conversations, during ambient sets, and occasionally in interviews. Every time, someone leans in. People feel it. They recognize something familiar in the shape of the unknown.

That’s why I wanted to finally tell it right.
In my voice. In my words. With the same care and intention I put into my music.

Watch the Full Video

📺 Watch on YouTube → HERE

This video is part personal memory, part ghost story, part tribute to the unseen.
I hope it gives you chills. I hope it makes you wonder.
And maybe—if you’ve ever had an experience you couldn’t explain—I hope it reminds you that you’re not alone in that mystery.

In Honor of What We Can’t Explain

Naming this project Six Missing wasn’t just about a ghost story.
It was about honoring something that doesn’t fit neatly into language.

It was about giving space to the things we can’t pin down—whether that’s grief, memory, or something more spiritual.

It was about trust.
In the unseen.
In the unexplained.
In the resonance of feeling something beyond words.

Thanks for listening.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for being part of this story now, too.

— TJ
(Six Missing)

Without Mind: An Album Designed for Deep Listening in a Distracted World

In a world where music is often consumed in fragments — a playlist here, a 15-second clip there — Without Mind was always meant to be something else entirely. It’s not background noise, it’s not a quick dopamine hit, and it’s certainly not made for skipping through. This record asks you to lean in, stay awhile, and let the sound pull you somewhere quieter.

When I began Without Mind, it was in the context of a single, transformative experience: creating an improvised soundtrack for ketamine-assisted therapy. The music unfolded in real time, with no edits, no plan — just instinct, emotion, and the tools around me. Modular synths, my Moog Matriarch, Minimoog, and the physical space itself all conspired to create textures that felt alive and unpredictable. That spirit carried through the entire trilogy.

I chose to release it in three parts before the full album dropped — a deliberate push against the “all at once, onto the next” mentality that dominates streaming culture. I wanted each section to have its own breathing room, to give listeners a chance to live inside it before moving on. Now that it’s all together, all 12 tracks, it feels like the record I always envisioned: big, dense, and immersive, but with moments of stillness that invite you to exhale.

The title, Without Mind, comes from the idea of being fully present without the constant narration of thought — the meditative state where awareness expands beyond words. That’s the listening posture I hope for: no pressure, no expectation, just allowing yourself to be carried.

If you can, try listening front to back in one sitting. Put your phone on the other side of the room. Maybe close your eyes. Let the room change shape. Let the layers reveal themselves. You’ll hear the deliberate imperfections, the subtle tape warble, the spaces where the gear was breathing on its own. That’s where the humanity is. That’s where I’m most at home.

And if you prefer something physical, the limited-edition 3xLP vinyl is out now — hand-numbered, beautifully packaged, and meant to be as much an art object as a listening experience.

→ Stream Without Mind
→ Order the Vinyl

Returning to the Quiet: How Floating Became a Spiritual Portal for Creativity and Calm

The first time I stepped into a sensory deprivation tank, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was chasing—maybe peace, maybe silence, maybe something unnamed. It was 2018, and I was deep into my mindfulness and spiritual practice in New York City. A friend had mentioned floatation therapy, and in a way that felt both impulsive and divinely timed, I booked a session at Blue Light Flotation with Sam Zeiger, one of NYC’s original floating veterans.

I was nervous, of course. The idea of being sealed away in darkness, floating in silence with only myself for company, held a quiet kind of terror. But Sam had a calm to him that put me at ease. He had that grounded energy—the kind that comes from someone who has seen many people return from the deep. Under his guidance, I began with 60-minute floats and gradually moved to 90, then 120. Before long, I was floating every two weeks.

And each time, I returned to something unspeakably profound.

After each session, Sam would offer me tea—never in a rush, never prescribing a response. He’d sit with me in stillness if I didn’t feel like talking, or he’d listen quietly if I did. That kind of presence is rare, and in a world that moves so fast, it left a lasting imprint on me.

Inside the tank, stripped of sound, light, weight, and time, I began to sense something sacred—a space beneath language, a stillness that felt alive. These weren’t just moments of relaxation; they were glimpses of the vastness we carry inside but rarely access. It felt like stepping into the quiet between heartbeats. Language fails there. But music—my music—began to shift.

As my float practice deepened, I noticed changes in my creativity. Ideas no longer arrived through effort but drifted in like fog, subtle and whole. I would leave the tank, towel-wrapped and blinking in the afternoon light, and head to the studio with melodies already humming behind my eyes. Floatation wasn’t inspiring in a conventional sense—it was reorienting. It reminded me of the creative power of stillness.

After moving to Austin, I lost the rhythm of floating. I tried a few places, but nothing quite clicked. There’s a vulnerability to this practice, and I needed a space that felt right—safe, warm, reverent. Recently, I discovered Ocean Lab, and I’m slowly reestablishing my ritual. The 90-minute floats are becoming my new cadence, offering relief for anxiety, releasing muscle tension, and opening the creative channel in ways that still surprise me.

Floatation therapy is more than relaxation. It’s a form of listening. A spiritual practice. A return. Inside the dark and weightless space, free from noise and gravity, I remember what it feels like to simply exist—unburdened and aware. For me, it’s a kind of meditation far beyond posture or breathwork. It’s presence distilled to its purest form.

In the context of ambient music composition, this stillness is everything. My work as Six Missing depends on slowness, on texture, on breath. Floating is the deepest breath I know. The clarity it offers is subtle but unmistakable—decisions feel less forced, sounds feel more connected. And in the silence of the tank, I hear the contours of new music before they even form.

If you’ve never floated before, it might sound strange to say that a pitch-black tank filled with warm water could change your life. But it can. It changed mine. And while I may go months without it, I always return—to the water, to the dark, to myself.

Smoke Signals: Ritual, Scent, and Creating Energy in the Studio

Before a single note is played, before the gear hums to life, I almost always begin with scent. A moment to light incense or Palo Santo, to let the smoke curl around the space like a gentle reminder: this is sacred.

It’s a small ritual, but one that creates a noticeable shift in the studio. The air changes. My body settles. The creative process doesn’t just begin with a sound—it begins with intention.

Why Ritual Matters in a Creative Practice

Over time, I’ve come to recognize that the work we do creatively isn’t just about inspiration—it’s about preparation. And for me, that begins with preparing the space. The scent of Palo Santo or the slow burn of incense becomes a kind of threshold, a way to cross into a different headspace.

It’s a centering practice. A clearing. It tells my nervous system that it’s time to shift from noise to presence, from scattered thought to focused openness.

Much like ambient music, scent works on a level that’s subtle and immersive. It doesn’t demand attention, but it shapes the experience. It holds the space.

Scent as an Extension of Sound

What I love about using incense in the studio is that it feels like a companion to the sound. The scent drifts slowly, like a drone or pad, subtle but expansive. It creates a space where ideas feel more welcome—like the energy has been wiped clean for something new to emerge.

Ambient music thrives in the spaces between, and scent works much the same way. It fills the gaps between thoughts. Between breaths. Between takes. It becomes part of the atmosphere, part of the architecture of the moment.

A Collaboration Rooted in Ritual

As part of the upcoming vinyl release of Without Mind, I’ve partnered with Goyo to create a custom paper incense blend that captures the feeling of this record. Goyo shares the same appreciation for ritual, intention, and sensory experience—and together, we’re crafting something that expands the world of the album beyond sound.

The idea is simple: when you light this incense and drop the needle, it becomes a full-bodied experience. One that’s not just heard, but felt. Smelled. Remembered.

I’ll have more to share soon about this limited edition piece of the Without Mind release, but I couldn’t be more grateful to work with a brand like Goyo that understands how scent can shape presence.

Creating Your Own Ritual

You don’t need a studio full of gear to build a ritual. All you need is intention. It could be incense. A deep breath. A light stretch. A walk around the block. Whatever helps clear the static and create the space.

And if you’re looking for a place to start—musically—I’ve curated Meditative Moments, a playlist of ambient tracks designed to support slow, intentional living:

🎧 Follow & Save Meditative Moments

Let the scent rise. Let the music settle. Then begin.

Until next time,
Your fellow human just being.

– Six Missing

Scoring the Everyday: How Ambient Music Can Shape Your Daily Rhythm

I’ve always loved the idea of a soundtrack for life—not in the dramatic, cinematic sense, but in the quiet, invisible way music can wrap itself around our routines. For me, ambient music isn’t just something I create—it’s something I live inside of. It shapes how I move through the world, and how the world feels as I move through it.

There’s a soft kind of magic in choosing sound intentionally. It can reframe a moment, shift the mood of a morning, or turn a mundane task into something meditative. And more and more, I find myself drawn to the idea that ambient music can be used to score the rhythms of daily life.

Music as Movement, Not Just Moment

Some people think of ambient music as background. I think of it as a thread—something that ties together the breath between moments. It’s not there to distract or to hype, but to accompany. To ground. To soften.

I’ve heard from listeners who play Six Missing while they make coffee, journal, stretch, meditate, walk, or simply breathe for a moment before the day begins. And that feels like the highest compliment—that something I created in stillness can now help someone else settle into their own quiet.

Routines as Rituals

Creating a sense of rhythm in your day isn’t about rigid scheduling. It’s about turning the small things—brewing tea, opening a window, lighting incense—into tiny rituals. And music can help anchor those rituals.

I often begin my mornings with sound before screens. A gentle drone. A slowly shifting pad. No lyrics, no rhythm to chase—just space to re-enter the day with softness. It’s a reminder to treat the first few hours not as a to-do list, but as a return.

Designing Sound for Function and Feeling

When I make ambient music, I’m often thinking about function just as much as feeling:

• Can this track help someone focus?

• Could it hold space for a moment of grief or clarity?

• Might it soothe the edges of a tough afternoon?

That’s why playlists like Meditative Moments exist—not as definitive answers, but as gentle suggestions. A sonic offering for wherever you find yourself.

🎧 Follow & Save Meditative Moments

Whether it’s background for a slow morning or accompaniment for evening journaling, these tracks are here to support your rhythm—not disrupt it.

A Living Soundtrack

Your life deserves to be scored with intention. Not every moment needs a crescendo. Some just need a breath, a tone, a little space to exist inside of. That’s what ambient music offers—a reminder that we’re allowed to move slowly, feel fully, and listen deeply.

Until next time,
Your fellow human just being.

– Six Missing

When the Sun Stays Too Long: Reflections on Summertime Depression

It always surprises people when I tell them that summer is the season I struggle with most. There’s this collective image of summer being carefree, joyful, full of barbecues and sunshine and bike rides. And as a kid, I loved it—the freedom from school, the summer movies, the long days of doing nothing. But somewhere along the way, summer shifted for me. It became too much.

Too bright. Too long. Too loud.

The Discomfort of Lightness

As someone who finds comfort in dim rooms, early sunsets, and a soft hoodie pulled over my head, summer feels like an unwanted spotlight. The constant heat, the expectation to be out and doing, the lack of quiet corners—it all builds into a kind of emotional friction. There’s a strange guilt in feeling low during a time the world tells you should be your happiest.

Living in Austin has magnified this. The summers here are long and relentless, and I often find myself retreating inward—not in a romantic, reflective way, but in a survival mode. The heat becomes isolating, not just physically but emotionally. It’s like a reverse winter. Everyone is outside and active, while I’m inside trying to protect my nervous system.

Seasonal Depression, Flipped

Most people associate seasonal affective disorder (SAD) with winter—and rightfully so. But summer-pattern SAD is very real, and it’s less often talked about. While winter SAD tends to be marked by low energy and craving comfort, summer SAD can show up as agitation, restlessness, anxiety, and trouble sleeping. It’s more like being overstimulated than depleted.

And for creatives, that internal restlessness can feel even more complicated. I want to make, but my nervous system is taxed. I want to feel inspired, but everything feels flattened by the sun.

Ambient Music as a Place to Retreat

This is one of the reasons ambient music has become not just my practice but my refuge. Ambient music offers a kind of internal season—a soft, cool, slow space I can return to even when the external world feels like too much. It gives me permission to slow down, to dim the lights, to exhale.

Many of the tracks I’ve made during summer months were born out of this exact feeling—not an escape, but an effort to build a space I could feel safe and soothed in. A sonic shelter.

If summer ever feels too intense for you, I’ve curated a playlist called Meditative Wind Down, which includes ambient pieces designed to ease the nervous system and cool the temperature of your thoughts:

🎧 Follow & Save Meditative Wind Down

Letting Yourself Feel It

If you also struggle with summer—whether in a small way or a deep one—you’re not alone. There’s no season that fits all of us. And just because the world feels bright and fast doesn’t mean you have to match it.

Your experience is valid. Your energy is valid. And your need for slowness, shade, or stillness is sacred.

Until next time,
Your fellow human just being.

– Six Missing

Inner Space: The Emotional Landscape of Six Missing

One of the questions I get asked often on podcasts is: Where does this music come from? Not in the technical sense—not the gear or software—but the deeper question of what drives the sound. And the truth is, everything I create as Six Missing comes from a place I can only describe as inner space.

It’s that space behind your eyes when you close them. The quiet place between thoughts. The part of you that remembers without words. That’s the terrain I try to explore through ambient music.

Sound as Emotional Memory

In my conversations on podcasts like Spotlight On and We All Speak In Poems, I’ve talked about how sound, for me, is often a form of emotional processing. I’ve never been someone who could easily articulate how I’m feeling in the moment—but give me a guitar, a delay pedal, a synth—and I can express what words can’t.

It’s not just about creating beautiful textures. It’s about tracing emotional arcs—anxiety, peace, loss, curiosity—and turning them into sonic environments. That’s why so much of my music is spacious. I want to give the listener room to feel, to breathe, to reflect.

The Influence of Burnout and Recovery

In the Spotlight On interview, I talked about the period of burnout that led to the creation of my EP Gentle Breath. That time taught me the importance of slowing down, of listening inward, and of creating music that doesn’t demand anything from the listener. No narrative. No hook. Just presence.

Music became a way to soothe my nervous system—to ground myself when things felt overwhelming. And now, it’s my way of offering that same stillness to others.

Improvisation and Flow

Another thread that came up in Modular Stories and Ambient Discourses was how much of Six Missing is built on improvisation. I love the idea of capturing a moment—not planning too much, just letting the sound unfold. Improvising with a synth and a filter, letting the delay trail carry a melody into somewhere unexpected—that’s where the magic lives.

That kind of spontaneity mirrors how I experience emotion. Rarely neat. Often nonlinear. But always layered.

Ambient Music as Permission

At its core, I think ambient music offers permission—to slow down, to feel, to not know, to not rush. Whether it’s playing during a walk, a late-night journaling session, or just while lying still on the floor, ambient music meets you where you are.

I’ve come to think of my music as a kind of mirror. Not one that reflects the outer world, but one that reveals something quiet and often overlooked inside. The parts of us that are still, that are soft, that are waiting to be heard.

If you’d like to step into that space, I’d recommend my Meditative Moments playlist. It’s filled with songs—mine and others’—that carry that same sense of emotional presence and stillness:

🎧 Follow & Save Meditative Moments

Until next time,
Your fellow human just being.

• Six Missing

Creating Emotion with Reverb & Delay: The Heart of Ambient Music

If there's one thing I've learned in making ambient music as Six Missing, it's that sound alone isn't enough—emotion lives in the space around the sound. That’s where reverb and delay come in. These two effects are the heart of how I shape emotional texture and movement. They’re not just tools; they’re mood shifters, sculptors of space, and conveyors of feeling.

Ambient music, by nature, doesn’t rely on melody or rhythm in the traditional sense. It relies on atmosphere, tone, and depth—and reverb and delay are essential for building that immersive world.

Why Reverb Matters

Reverb simulates space. It tells your brain how big a room is, how far away a sound might be, or whether you're hearing something in a cathedral, a cave, or under the surface of water. But in ambient music, reverb isn't just about creating a sense of space—it's about dissolving boundaries.

I often use long, lush reverb tails that stretch notes into eternity, letting them drift and blur into one another. This creates a kind of sonic fog that softens edges and makes everything feel connected. It’s a way of letting a sound linger emotionally, like the echo of a thought or a feeling you can’t quite shake.

The Emotional Weight of Delay

Where reverb creates space, delay creates memory. A delayed sound is a reflection, a moment that repeats and transforms over time. In ambient music, I love using delay not just for rhythmic echo, but for the emotional weight it carries—a voice or guitar note bouncing back like a memory you keep returning to.

Delays can be short and subtle, like the feeling of déjà vu, or long and unpredictable, like the passage of time. I often use tape-style delays or analog units that introduce gentle imperfections—flutter, warble, degradation—that make the echoes feel more human.

How I Use Reverb & Delay in Six Missing

One of the ways I build emotional space in my music is by stacking multiple reverbs. I might use a shorter room reverb to emulate a physical space or proximity—something that brings a bit of presence and intimacy—and then layer it with a long, washed-out tail that lets everything dissolve into the atmosphere. This contrast helps create depth, giving the sound both weight and lift, grounding it while allowing it to drift.

In my studio, I’ve built a signal chain that includes vintage delay pedals, reverb units, and modular effects chains that allow me to sculpt space in real time. Some go-to tools include:

• Boss DD-20 in looping mode for cascading echoes.

• Meris Mercury7 for reverb that sounds like it’s from another galaxy.

• EarthQuaker Devices Avalanche Run for dreamy stereo ambiance.

• Analog tape machines to create natural tape delay and saturation.

When I'm creating, I rarely hear a dry sound and say “that’s it.” It's usually once the sound is bathed in reverb or bouncing through delay lines that it starts to feel like Six Missing.

Why It Matters

In a world that’s loud, fast, and sharp-edged, ambient music offers a place to slow down and soften. Reverb and delay create that softening effect. They let sounds blur into one another, letting listeners rest in the spaces between.

Whether I’m designing a track for meditation, nighttime reflection, or a deep emotional dive, these tools allow me to shape an experience that’s not just heard—but felt.

If you’re curious about how these textures play out in real time, check out my playlist Meditative Moments, where reverb and delay are woven into every track to help you slow down, breathe, and just be:

🎧 Follow & Save Meditative Moments

Until next time,
Your fellow human just being.

• Six Missing

Returning Home: Reflections on Family and Self Through Sound

Spending time with family is never just about the visit—it’s about the history, the patterns, the quiet moments that stretch between conversations. It’s about returning to a version of yourself you thought you outgrew, only to realize how much of it still lives in you.

Lately, I’ve been reflecting on how being around family can be its own kind of meditation. There’s something about sitting across from your parents, seeing your mannerisms reflected back at you, hearing a familiar tone in someone else’s voice—and realizing, that’s me too.

The Mirror of Family

Being home—physically or emotionally—means stepping into an environment that shaped you. It can be comforting. It can be challenging. Often, it’s both. You catch glimpses of the traits you’ve carried forward: maybe a stubbornness, a certain way of handling stress, a deep sense of care. And then there are the things you’ve tried to unlearn, the parts you’re gently rewriting in yourself.

It’s not about judgment. It’s about awareness. Noticing the echoes of your upbringing in your adult self and asking, Do I want to keep this? Or do I want to shift it?

The Practice of Patience

Family dynamics aren’t always easy. Old stories resurface. Roles we thought we shed reappear without warning. But what I’ve learned is that these moments, though sometimes difficult, are invitations—to slow down, to respond rather than react, to extend the same compassion we offer to strangers back to the people who raised us.

In that way, being with family becomes a practice, one not so different from meditation: sit with it, breathe through it, notice what comes up, and let it move.

How Ambient Music Mirrors This Process

There’s a parallel for me in the ambient music I create as Six Missing. So much of ambient composition is about space, patience, and reflection. There’s no rush. No hard start or stop. Just the slow unfolding of texture, the subtle shifts that ask you to notice rather than chase.

Just like in family relationships, there’s room for tension and release, for moments of dissonance and deep harmony. Sometimes a single drone or melody line will repeat and shift so slightly that you don’t realize it’s changed until you’re fully immersed in something new.

Creating this kind of music has taught me to listen more closely, to be with what’s present without needing to fix it—a skill that’s just as important when navigating the nuances of family.

An Invitation to Reflect

If you’re spending time with family, or even just thinking about your roots, I invite you to approach it like you would a quiet piece of music:

• Pause. Notice what emotions arise.

• Listen for what’s beneath the surface. Not everything is loud or obvious.

• Allow space. Sometimes just being together is enough.

And if you need something to help ease into that reflective space, I’ve curated a playlist called Meditative Moments, full of ambient tracks that hold space for introspection, including subtle field recordings and gentle textures that mirror these emotional landscapes:

🎧 Follow & Save Meditative Moments

Whether you’re sitting with your parents at the kitchen table or alone with a memory, know that the process of noticing, reflecting, and evolving is sacred. And you don’t have to rush it.

Until next time,
Your fellow human just being.

• Six Missing