Caught In Joy
Glass Cities Don't Dream
An analog ambient session designed for focus, calm, and deep mental escape.
I call it Glass Cities Don’t Dream because I remember working corporate jobs — well paid, stable, outwardly successful — yet something inside me was slowly dimming. The buildings were made of glass and light, but there was no room to breathe.
This record is what came after.
In a world built from glass and light, everything reflects — but nothing truly rests. This music moves slowly through that space. No urgency. No spectacle. Just restrained analog motion and quiet depth.
The first 28 minutes come from a continuous improvisation that originally unfolded over nearly an hour — including a brief pause to rewind the tape. As always, it was recorded in a single take. No reconstruction. No assembling sections afterward. From that longer performance, the strongest and most coherent moments were preserved into one uninterrupted 28-minute arc shaped by instinct rather than arrangement.
The second half began as an experiment. Over the years I’ve released more than 85 albums — long-form works built around distinct movements and themes. Between those movements were quieter passages: suspended textures and harmonic drifts that often appeared briefly before the next idea arrived.
I went back and listened differently. Not for songs — but for space.
The quietest fragments were isolated and carefully reshaped into a continuous 55-minute composition. This took hours of detailed work: aligning tonal balance between recordings made years apart, sculpting transitions so they breathe naturally, and in some cases re-recording sections through my tape machines to unify their texture and depth.
Together, these two parts form an 83-minute experience: a new studio performance paired with a carefully engineered long-form atmosphere that stands on its own.
Recorded on two TEAC 80-8 tape machines. Mixed on two mixers TEAC Model 5 from the 70s. Caught In Joy is playing Moog One, Moog Model D, Moog Matriarch, Moog Messenger, Sequential Prophet-10, Akai MPC Live 3 and modular synths.
