Black LP w/ download.
It's 2020, and everyone is exhausted. The world is falling apart, and then there's the day-today
stress of just existing in the modern world. Keeping up with everything feels impossible,
and we all feel that neverending push to always be productive, inspiration and motivation be
damned.
For NYC artist Photay (a.k.a. Evan Shornstein), none of this is particularly conducive to living
a healthy existence, let alone being creative, but he's decided to face it head on. Waking
Hours, his second full-length (following 2017's Onism), is a meditation on time and, more
specifically, our obsessive need to fill every moment with activity. "It's about getting back to
a really simple notion of just celebrating your existence and not necessarily attaching this
huge story of who you are and what you do," he says. "It's about finding comfort in just
being."
Photay's search for calm is at the very core of Waking Hours, and while he admits that
making the album was therapeutic, it shouldn't be mistaken for some sort of healing
ambient excursion. The LP is largely electronic, but frequently verges on pop and
extensively features Shornstein's own vocals. The music is intimate and inviting, but it also
suggests that Photay is perhaps at his best when he's blurring genre boundaries. "I really
truly love so many different types of music," he says, "and for this album I opened things up
and gave myself the freedom to go anywhere."
