Soft Erasure

A preview of new music from Gray Acres

I’m happy to share that Soft Erasure, the newest release from Gray Acres, is now mastered (biggest thanks and highest recommendation to

quiet details

for this!) and queued up for release around summer’s end. It will receive a nice packaging job as a CD through long time friends/collaborators Fluid Audio.

More to come in due course, including some “behind-the-scenes” notes on instruments and processes used, detail on the release and ordering timeline, and perhaps a couple performance announcements. For now, I just wanted to mark the occasion and put it on your radar if you aren’t familiar with our work. A preview of three of my favorite tracks follows down below as a big old “THANK YOU” for paid subscribers.

Gray Acres has always been a space for subtlety and restraint, even more so than my solo work, and distinct from the denser, more cinematic atmospheres of Hotel Neon. Where those projects often explore process and narrative arcs, Gray Acres tends to stay still and let you think a little bit. Soft Erasure especially embraces that stillness.

This is the first full-length Gray Acres album since 2021’s “Dreams and Phantoms.” It’s a project that came together slowly with an intentionally light touch…more about dissolving sounds than constructing them. Subtraction vs. addition.

The title Soft Erasure came about as we noticed a recurring quality across the recordings: a sense of tangible things like guitars, pianos, and strings fading, softening, and slipping just out of reach as we shaped and processed them. The music feels like it’s constantly on the verge of vanishing, or being gently wiped away into atmosphere. That idea of erasure not as violence, but as gentleness, decay, or transformation, felt like the right metaphor to latch on to. It speaks to memory, distance, and time, and how all of those forces shape and reshape our perception of sound and self.

Musically, this album is built mainly from resampled acoustic instruments: delicate piano lines, sustained strings, frozen and looped guitar textures. Much of the source material was recorded clean, then stretched, blurred, and layered until it became something abstract…like an impression of a song, or a half-remembered phrase. In some ways, we were trying to find the most washed-out and ephemeral version of each sound. The result is a record that is designed less for narrative and more for immersion.

If you’ve followed this project before, I think you’ll hear a natural continuation of its aesthetic. But if you’re new to Gray Acres, this is a great entry point. It’s music that tries not to demand attention, but rewards those who tune in closely for a while.

Look forward to sharing it with you soon!

– Andrew