BEYOND

Beyond began the way the best collaborations do — without a plan. Eben Vogel sent over a small collection of solo piano pieces: simple, emotive, full of quiet momentum. TJ Dumser (Six Missing) received them, listened, and felt something immediately. The melodies had a quality that was hard to name — not quite finished, but not incomplete either. They felt like openings.

What followed was the process Six Missing knows best: stretching those moments outward, surrounding them with atmosphere, texture, and space — tape machines, guitar loops, vintage synthesizers, modular effects — until each piece felt less like a song and more like a place you could actually step into. Cinema for the mind. Music for films that haven’t been made yet.

The two composers had connected over social media, drawn together by a mutual appreciation for each other’s work. Over time, the conversations turned to collaboration — what it might sound like to blend Vogel’s gorgeous, structured piano with Dumser’s expansive, cinematic soundscapes. Beyond is the answer to that question. Despite the distance, the record carries no sense of remoteness. It sounds like two people listening to each other carefully.

There is a haunting quality to these pieces. They’re contemplative — evoking nostalgia, memory, the particular ache of things that have passed and things not yet arrived. Some of it sounds like home videos. Some of it sounds like the moment just before you remember something important. The sessions also carried a quiet emotional weight for Dumser, composed during a period of personal loss. That grief isn’t announced anywhere on the record, but it’s present — woven into the fabric of every choice, every space left open.

Everything on Beyond is hand-played and hand-built. No two takes the same. The record is entirely human — two composers, working from opposite ends of the country, building something together that neither could have made alone.

On the Sound

Dumser brought the full weight of his studio to these sessions. The Korg PS-3100 and Moog Memorymoog handle texture and counter-melody. A vintage Moog Minimoog layers warmth through the mid-frequencies. Guitar — electric slide, acoustic, and pedal-effected — weaves through every track, a reflection of the guitar-forward direction Dumser has been exploring in his solo work. The Hologram Microcosm processes piano into shimmering microloops; the MTL.ASMLY Count to Five fragments and suspends melody. Tape machines add the kind of softness that can’t be dialed in.

Vogel’s piano is the anchor. Recording his Yamaha U1 over two days — working through multiple close mic placements to find exactly the right capture — he arrived at a tone that is distinctly his own: intimate, present, and full of character. The goal was intentional: to lay down musical structure and a simple landscape, leaving room for Six Missing to inhabit and expand. His playing is emotive without being sentimental, structured without being rigid — the kind of performance that leaves space for something else to breathe around it. That space is where Six Missing lives.

Eben Vogel — Piano, Arrangements

TJ Dumser (Six Missing) — Synthesizers, Sound Design, Additional Arrangements, Mix & Mastering

Jack Kenneth Truesdale — Artwork

Released May 8, 2026 | Self-Released