Landon Caldwell creates sonic landscapes built on texture and melody, threaded with an inward-looking, emotive resilience. His new album, Strategic Light, grows from that same patient, deliberate place where synthetic sounds reveal an organic core. There’s something so pleasing about the aural world Caldwell has assembled here, something that resists easy categorization but invites deep listening. The album weaves breath and whispers through the buzzing electronics of hopefulness, creating moments of stillness where listeners can let go. Restraint builds something approaching grandeur across these nine compositions, each one functioning like a deep breath in a world of distraction.
Caldwell’s practice has long circled questions of environment, memory, and how sound can hold the weight of personal experience. Strategic Light feels like a culmination of those interests, a record that asks how we put our energy into the world and what circles in our gravity. What makes the album work is how Caldwell balances the rhythmic undercurrents of life with sustained organ drones and scattered percussion, crafting a journey that feels both meditative and ecstatic. It’s a deeply personal album that manages to feel universal, an invitation to focus a little more in a culture pulling us in a thousand different directions.
Strategic Light is out this Friday, November 29, via Medium Sound. Pre-order it HERE and enjoy Foxy Digitalis’s exclusive stream of the full album below!
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I’m curious about your earliest memories and relationship with sound, before it became something you consciously worked with. What are some things that stick with you, something that made you aware of listening as its own kind of attention?
I’m so glad you asked this. I love sharing this stuff, because it hasn’t been until the last few years that I realized the significance of some of these sound memories.
In the handful of VHS home videos my folks have held onto from my early childhood, I am constantly making sound. I’m finger drumming or doing a sort of beatboxing. One in particular stands out where I’m standing at the foot of the hospital bed, admiring my brand new baby sister. But I don’t really remember any of that.
I do remember sitting on the toilet before I could wipe my own ass. My dad had gutted the bathroom, and there was fresh drywall up. I distinctly remember the sound of the silence, this sort of ringing white noise that I likened to the cheer of a crowd. And it’s funny to think of that as an adult who is interested in stuff like John Cage, sound art, etc.
There was another time, maybe the strongest memory, where I was skid-stopping on my bike in the gravel alley by the house, and my tire kicked a rock that hit the old lady across the street’s gutter. It echoed gloriously 2 or 3 times through the neighborhood. I was entranced by the sound. I picked up more rocks and started throwing them at her house. She came running out in her floral nightgown, screaming. My aunt was watching us that afternoon. She was pissed, and the neighbor lady was pissed. I couldn’t figure out why everyone was so mad. My aunt made me put my nose in the corner, which wasn’t a normal punishment at my house. I found it absurd and laughed uncontrollably, which didn’t help the situation.
When did you first want to make sound, or play an instrument, rather than just listen? I’m thinking about that moment when passive listening becomes active creation. Was there a specific instance where you thought, “I need to do something with this”?
I followed the kind of standard pipeline for a lot of my millennial peers who come from rural midwestern places, that sort of metal to punk & hardcore pipeline. And it all kind of hit at once. There was probably a year, around 12 or 13, where I got into Black Sabbath, the Ramones, and some local hardcore stuff. I mowed my grandpa’s yard for a year, and he bought me my first guitar from a pawn shop, a red Jackson I still have. A few years later, I started my first band and played my first show. I shared a bill with some folks I still collaborate with to this day, like Mark Tester and Sam Thompson.
You describe your work as exploring environment, family, and class through sound. Those are deeply personal territories. How did you come to understand that sound could hold and reveal those particular layers of experience?
I think there are more obvious ways sound can do this, like through field recordings and the like. When I had kids, I embraced recording in the room where they were playing and leaving all that “undesirable” sound in.
I’ve also been able to explore these themes through the narrative presented around the music, like titles and artwork, which, to me, helps provide context and a sort of skeletal structure for the listener’s imagination.
Built and natural environments have been front and center in my work, making installations and multichannel audio for the last few years. I’ve done a number of works in urban greenspaces and parks, works that use sound and video of domestic scenes, etc.
There are other, less obvious ways I explore these themes as well, like through the organization of groups/ensembles, the embrace of improvisation as a form of play. I’m not trying to create in some intellectual vacuum, so, for me, it only makes sense that these deeply personal things are front and center in my work.
I make music too, and I remember the exact moment I realized I could compose rather than just perform what already existed. Do you have a moment like that? When did you realize you could build your own sonic worlds from scratch?
Yes! I am a fan of your work!
I knew before I got a guitar that I wanted to start a band. I did when I was fifteen, but all that creative exploration was within the confines of a 3-piece band.
I got a cracked copy of Sony Acid, also from my grandpa, and recorded some high school bands. But it wasn’t until later, maybe 18, I realized you could manipulate recordings as a creative expression. That was something that really resonated with me, realizing you could change this past experience. It felt like magic. You could reverse things, make loops, and rearrange parts. I spent the better part of a decade just experimenting and figuring things out. I spent a few years dabbling in analog purism before fully embracing the computer.
Strategic Light opens with questions about how we put our energy into the world, about sharing your glow, and what circles in your gravity. Those feel like really personal questions, not just conceptual frameworks. What brought you to that line of questioning?
I have spent a lot of time thinking about the ways I engage with reality, in physical and virtual worlds. The difference between the ways our culture engages in real life and online is pretty astounding. I’ve been thinking about the narratives that exist around how artists should exist in the world and online. I started thinking about the downstream effects of how we engage. Always asking myself, is what I am doing rebuilding a sense of community? Am I engaging in behavior that causes more division and supports current oppressive power structures? Am I expanding someone’s sense of possibility? Am I creating a sense of wonder?
For better or worse, I have an ironclad sense of optimism. We’re all being pulled in a thousand different attentional directions, and I’m asking, what if we focused a little more? How much farther do your efforts go? So that is sort of the prompt or text score for this album.
You describe the album as “nine deep breaths in a world of distraction.” I love that framing. How did you approach the compositional structure to create that sense of breathing, of deliberate pause?
All the compositions are part of a daily practice for me. I spend a few hours every night after my kids go to bed in my studio working. Most nights, I blink and it’s midnight. Hitting that flow state is also the center of my spiritual practice. It’s a total nervous system reset.
I’ve been sharing a lot of excerpts from these musical journals over the last few months via my newsletter (sign up!), lending further context to the album and also poking at expectations about how music is shared, how sacred and ‘perfected’ an album should be. And, for the heads, I’ve put a lot of this stuff on Soulseek as well. The compositions on Strategic Light are more refined than those raw journal excerpts, but all the work is coming from the same place.
But the newsletter piece is kind of important, because it’s a parallel project. It’s me investigating how the tools I’m using to create a community around my work (Instagram, Bandcamp, etc) affect that community and their perception of my work.
There’s this wonderful phrase about “the church of memory” in relation to the organ drones. I’m curious about memory as a sonic space for you. How does working with certain sounds or tones access memory differently than, say, looking at photographs?
I had kids and turned 30 around the same time, and, naturally, those shifts tapped me into this interest in memory and how it’s this entire other psychic space we can inhabit. And as one might expect, my first inclination would be to explore the intersection of memory and sound.
Another early sound memory is watching my great-aunt play organ at church when I was a kid. I hated most things about church, but the organ was something that enthralled me. Watching her move her bare feet and hands around, and those long sustained chords shooting out of the pipes with the congregation singing in unison as a big choir. I think those sounds were deeply informative.
I’ve always had trouble articulating ideas, and I think that is why I’ve always been attracted to sound. It works as a sort of shortcut; it’s a lot easier for me to get to the point with sound. And I think there is something true with memory too. Sound can be a shortcut to the psychic spaces that are at the core of memory. And we build our sense of identity around memory and personal mythology. And to me, sound has always held deep truths, because it can so quickly cut to those spaces for anyone. Throw on Steve Miller Band’s Greatest Hits and I’m instantly 7 on my way to baseball practice in my dad’s S-10.
I think of memory as a sacred space itself, a place where our loved ones who have passed on can continue to live with us. I’m not a Christian, but I carry a St. Christopher medallion in my pocket that my great-grandfather gave me. These sorts of things have become very interesting and meaningful to me, and that has become a focal point in my work, looking at where memory and mythology and history and identity overlap.
To that point, I recently finished a yet-to-be-released commission that used sound memories related to professional wrestling as a way to examine regional identity, mythology, and memory.
You talk about “pulsing and buzzing utopia” alongside these organ drones and scattered percussion. How did you balance those ecstatic, almost overwhelming moments with the more meditative spaces?
So much of my process is based around intuition. Embracing that all this sound is part of the same continuum and trying to create a journey traversing from point A to point B has consistently been one of the most exciting creative processes for me. I’m often excited by seeing how many different places I can take a work and still have it feel cohesive. And that’s kind of the utopian line, too. It’s central to how I find meaning in life, like how do we get from where we are to a better world?
I see the Midwest as this landscape ripe for utopia, and I’m always trying to reflect that in my work. That’s really the central thesis to the sonic world of Medium Sound and all the work Mark Tester and I make together. I think, at the very least, it is important to exercise your imagination in that way.
How did you approach the compositional structure of Strategic Light to create this sense of breathing, of deliberate pause? I really love the framing of ‘deep breaths in a world of distraction’ and very much feel that while listening to the record.
That’s wonderful to hear that feeling translated. A lot of these compositions start as improvisations that serve as the sort of score for the piece. I go back through and emphasize what is there (oftentimes through subtraction as much as addition).
I’ve always loved composing albums as a whole, crafting that large arc across the songs and sides of an album. I think that is part of the reason I have become so interested in different mediums for creating sound, like installations, because there is a similar search for creating feelings of some of these intangible things we’ve discussed, like mood and arc, and drawing on themes that don’t seem to be related to music in any way.
Last thing about the album, and maybe this is too broad, but what does strategic light mean to you now that the album exists in the world? Has the meaning changed from when you started versus what it became?
I was just talking to my wife about this last night, relating to a creative project she is working on. About how creating solo work is so wild, because you work and work and work before anyone else hears it. Then, the second you share it, you know almost everything you want to change about the album. I put a lot of time, about 6 months, between the first finished draft and the last. And much of that time was spent sharing it privately with different “audiences”.
So at this point, the album has landed on quite a few ears, and I feel really good about the work and all the meaning behind it.
It is really rewarding to go from a big, messy work-in-progress to a finished product. In this case, I couldn’t be more pleased with the physical tape, too. The amazing art borrowed from Chris Vorhees really pushed it to the next level for me.
I also wanted to ask about the Sound Field project – I’m so fascinated by it. So, for our readers, it’s in collaboration with Rob Funkhouser and Justin Cooper, and involves creating these massive wooden lattices that function as sculptures and a sort of sonic canvas. How does composing for a 48-channel work embedded in this physical architecture change your approach compared to, say, a stereo recording?
Sound Field was an exhibition/installation I was involved in with Rob and Justin last year. The exhibition was at a Guichelaar Gallery at Tube Factory artspace, and it centered around this large sound sculpture we built, comprised of repurposed wood arranged into a sort of lattice work. We built the speakers and all. There are 48 channels of audio, and the sculpture plays back a library of bespoke compositions. Currently, two pieces by Rob and three by myself. The latticework is hung on the wall. The sound moves around the surface.
We hung the piece in a corner. I think it’s like 24 feet. I guess I could easily look it up, but I’m gonna roll with 24 feet.
I kept thinking of the sound movement as if my eyes were moving across a large painting, moving in and out, zooming in, zooming out.
I initially developed my compositions at live performances on a 4-channel system at Dear Mom in Indianapolis and on the 16-channel CLEAT system at Elastic Arts in Chicago before building them up to 48 channels for the Sound Field system.
When sound comes directly from wooden panels rather than traditional speakers, does that change the quality of what you’re creating? I’m thinking about resonance, about how the material itself becomes part of the instrument.
The wood boxes are like 10” x 6” with ¾” frames and a very thin layer of maple ply. They are arranged in a lattice work. We attached speaker drivers to the ply and the ply becomes the cone of the speaker. The character is relatively true to the recorded sound, but maybe a bit woodier.
Each one is mounted on a hinge. The piece can be hung in numerous configurations/shapes, such as a wave, a small C-shaped room, etc.
What’s next for the three of you?
Sound Field is still an active project. We’re currently hoping that institutional funding to install Sound Field and commission new works by us and other artists falls into our laps.
Until then, Rob has a new album called ‘Respiratory Cycle’. Rob and I are involved in an opera. We’ve got some funding, and he’s helping me compose for a concept I’ve written, which will happen next year sometime.
And to close, as always… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
It’s so hard to pick just one. Most any white noise analogue, like filling the bathtub, fans, radio static, etc.
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