Tommy Carroll, Julius Tucker, Aidan Epstein - Prosthetic (2022) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

This album was recorded in the summer of 2021, when we were just beginning to be able to emerge into the musical world with some amount of regularity. I had originally planned to capture some live grooves to build on in my home studio, but the interaction between myself, Aidan and Julius was so harmonious I knew I had a project that spoke to my current emotions after our single 4-hour recording session.
I’ve made quite a few records at this point, but this one gets at the feeling of empathy you get in live performance that can be hard to capture in studio. I like to somewhat jokingly say the best music is made when no one is listening, and we had one of those moments except for the fact that some microphones were listening. Everything you hear is fully improvised. I think this is what it means for three musicians to truly serve the music. The music was in us in the room and we just got out of the way to let it flow. I frequently felt as if I was floating above the drum kit, listening to Julius and Aidan’s beautiful interplay while my limbs moved independently. I purposely left in our shouts of surprise and delight to let you relive the moment with us.
The title Prosthetic refers to my prosthetic eyes. It’s interesting how people think of blindness as a scary or ugly thing, but call my plastic eyes beautiful. Similarly, people can fear the uncertainty and chaos of improvised music, but still hear beauty if certain recognizable sonic ideas are maintained. The idea of this group is to freely improvise music, but pretend like we’re playing songs. We exist in the organic chaos of spontaneity, but draw on our memories of wrote musical experiences to make sense of it. My biological body is supposedly broken, but can be seen as attractive or at least whole because my eyes were designed to meet a certain specification. Is it organic or synthetic? Graceful or messy? You decide.