“The album title came from a recording that a professor of mine played in class,” Stooshinoff says. “I heard the line ‘there are no graves here,’ and it stuck with me. The idea of ‘no grave’ became a metaphor for feeling like I had no place to bury the past.” The problem was a pertinent one, because Stooshinoff was living in a through a series of traumas. The illness and subsequent death of his mother, the end of a cherished relationship. “The past was constantly alive,” he says, no matter how he attempted to lay it to rest.

There Are No Graves Here was something of a response, if not to excavate some space of rest then to at least provide comfort through the lived experience of grief. “I wanted the song titles to reflect the domestic scenes that dominated my life,” he explains. “I was thinking a lot about caregiving, and laboring for our loved ones.” The theme runs through the record, sometimes manifesting in the most direct manner, with audio recordings of family dinners playing amid the ambient tones. The effect is to ground the emotion of the music in the everyday, the clips capturing the textures of familial love in their most beautiful mundanity. The easy conversation, the small jokes, the clink of cutlery on the plates.

The songs were composed using a Eurorack modular synthesizer and cassette tape, with improvised acoustic guitar adding extra layers, and their form is indebted to this set-up. “There aren’t any ‘presets’ in a modular system,” Stooshinoff explains. “Rather they are volatile: once you turn off the system or unplug your patch, the sounds are essentially unrepeatable.” There’s a sense of space to the tracks, a natural ebb and flow that conveys a certain ephemerality. From plaintive threnody ‘Your Wife, Your Husband’ and delicate washes of ‘Not Wake Up,’ to the organic sparkle of ‘Moment i’, these are songs of a specific time and place, arising in their unique moment and vanishing just as quickly, preserved on tape by chance.

This effect comes full circle, informing the style of the songs and also reinforcing the thematic and personal purpose behind them. “This wasn’t a record I ever intended to release,” Stooshinoff admits. “I didn’t create these pieces with the vision of an album in mind. At best they were sketches I made to forget about the contemporaneous moment.” But after putting the songs away for a while, he eventually shared them with his brother, who encouraged him to see the work through. “These pieces are emotional for me because I know what I was feeling when I composed them, but I worried that that wouldn’t translate,” Stooshinoff admits. But, in putting away such concerns, what emerges is a mediation on love, care and grief in its most immediate and intimate form. The fleeting nature of life caught on tape in all of its beauty and sadness.

There Are No Graves Here is out now and available from the Patient Hands Bandcamp page.

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Blood Warrior – Wooden Shade
Rosie Tucker – How Sad, How Lovely (Connie Converse cover)
Fran – Company
JAYA – Learn To Swim
Taylor Hamilton – What Is Real?
Carver Baronda – If Nothing Else Comes Along
Rose Dorn – Deathwish
Milly – Crazy Horse
Guidon Bear – Washing Machine
Joey Nebulous – Pride Month
Dorio – Shortcuts
Special Friend – Before
Sarah Pagé – Lithium Taper
Old Amica – Condensation
Blushing – Dream Merchants
Patient Hands – Stasis
Bryce Kepner – Chances
Jake Bellissimo – why fit? (Jordaan Mason cover)

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Stoic is an album based around Stooshinoff’s experiences of “year-long sickness, and the warp and weft of mystical experience that ran through it.” Encapsulating the Patient Hands style, the record delved into Stooshinoff’s life by “walk[ing] a line between self-satire and sincerity,” the songs loaded with disarmingly open lyrics that nevertheless maintain a humorous edge (even if the jokes are so personal as to only make sense to the artist himself). “Stoic is a love record,” Stooshinoff concludes in the record’s preface. “It’s about enduring the dark night, and finding the courage to live with an open heart.”

Today we’re thrilled to share ‘Stasis’, the lead single and title track from a forthcoming Patient Hands release. Recorded when Stooshinoff was just 19, Stasis was originally released under the moniker Living Room, though has long since been removed from the internet. After the good reception for Stoic, Stooshinoff is reissuing the album as Patient Hands but not changing anything, allowing the work to stand as a coming-of-age piece crafted from the uncertainty and plastic identity of late adolescence.

The album is autobiographical, from the soundscapes crafted to portray Stooshinoff’s experiences with ayahuasca in the Peruvian Amazon to the use of field recordings of his family together after a funeral, right through to the artwork that features him and his older brother. The sound is therefore authentic, a moving and at times surreal collection of songs that takes lived experience and condenses it into a purer form—a tonic for the listener that proves both cathartic and transportive.

As a single, ‘Stasis’ encapsulates this aesthetic, a lush and textured sound that is at once morose and affirming. Taken at face value, the song serves as an interesting exploration of the confusing space of youth, where one’s path and position within a family is yet to be decided. That the song is being re-released after several years gives the sound another aspect too, lifting it beyond the moment to become a reckoning with the past. Any considered engagement with what we were or what we thought we might be is always bittersweet, gladness, nostalgia and sorrow blended into one.

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