Jess White ‘27 Releases the boundary under common occurrence!

On February 9, 2024, Reed freshman and Sociology major Jess White released his junior album, the boundary, under the artist name common occurrence! after releasing 6 singles between July 2023 and January 2024. This album, which White describes is dream pop, is 36 minutes long with 11 tracks. Overall, the album uses electronic elements, vocal distortion, and looping to create a melancholy, nostalgic, and self-reflective lo-fi experience, with soft vocals, sharp electronic drum beats, and dreamy synthesizers. These work to create an overall feeling of obscurity that draws the listener calmly into White’s emotional journey throughout the past year. 

White, who has been “recording music since freshman year [of high school]” but has “been making music since third grade,” began releasing music under the name “Jess” on soundcloud, but began the common occurrence! project his junior year of high school. “I saw these producers, especially when I first started getting into production, these bedroom pop producers making stuff in their bedrooms,” said White, who “was like, fuck it, I want to try that. And then eventually, I got more and more into it. My brother is also a producer. So we bounce off of each other.” 

While sitting in his room coming up with band names with an ex-girlfriend, White came up with the common occurrence! name, which is “supposed to be like, a self deprecating joke, basically saying that my music is a common occurrence and that it's not really worth a lot.” White was “going to start a new project when I got to Reed actually, that was my plan. But [the name] stuck.” 

In 2022, White began the common occurrence! project with EPs common occurrence #1 and #2, and debut album a closing note. In 2023, he released another EP: great timing, along with two singles that do not appear on any albums: full stop and flowers off the ground. "I feel like the boundary is when I really found the sound that I wanted to go for," says White, who wrote a closing note to start “experimenting with my sound, trying to get more out there and just make some different shit really, but it was really rushed.” great timing happened after White “learned a few more production techniques, but it was also really quick and kind of rushed through because at the time in my music production that was my style of making, just sit down and make a song and be done with it.” With the boundary, White began “pouring actual hours of time into my work.”

Moving to Reed has made White “take more time on individual songs, because I can't spend so many like long bursts of energy. So I end up being a lot more meticulous now." On the boundary, White feels “like I’m actually locking down my sound as an artist. I feel as if I’ve picked the direction in which I want to go.” The album definitely has both direction and consistent thematics, while songs like “house one on A st.” off of great timing pull off an interesting variety of mixing styles to create an engaging experimental effect, the album does not feel nearly as cohesive as the boundary does. 

The album does not only represent a transformation in White’s artistic style; it is also a representation of White’s life experience over the last year. At the beginning of recording the album, White “had recently gotten with my partner at the time and broken up with them during the formation of this album.” His “father also passed away while he was recording the album.” 

White’s father is featured in one of the two photographs that make up the album cover: the bottom photo is his father’s graduation from college. This specific photo is meant to parallel White’s entrance into college, along with serving as “a bit of an homage" to his father. “The top photo is my brother Lee,” says White, “we were at the river together and he was standing in front of that graffiti mural. And I just took a candid shot of him looking at it. [...] [it] didn't really symbolize the vibe I was going for the album. But I think it fed into it."

White names his greatest musical influence to be the Irish indie rock musician Far Caspian, which is clear from a lot of his synthesizer work along with his vocal mixing throughout the boundary. Recently, he’s also taken some influence from George Clanton, an artist who continues to pioneer the vaporwave/electronica genre with his 2023 album Ooh Rap I Ya, and White also cites Car Seat Headrest and Phoenix as having influenced his production throughout the common occurrence! project. To me, the album reminds me of indie/ambient musician Flatsound, due to similar melodic tendencies along with production styles.

Conceptually, the boundary is “mainly written about these conflicts I have with myself,” says White. “I do this thing with myself where I convince myself of something and then I get very anxious over that thing, and then I start to backpedal on it. And this goes with all my relationships with people,” explains White, who considers “that spot of [...] not being able to choose a side” as a sort of “boundary” of how he’s feeling. “There's like this theme in the album of like dualities,” says White, who explains how this can be seen in the first two tracks: “a different field” and “stay here.”

“a different field,” which opens with brisk, grainy electric guitar chords and the lyrics “I’d do anything to come back here / I’d do anything to stay,” makes you feel like you’re in some sort of hazy memory with its distorted spoken word sampling, providing texture to White’s soft, self-reflective lyricism. The song was “written about going to college and also having a partner,” says White, and was the fourth song he recorded for the album, constructed with the idea in mind of “obsessively wanting to keep [a person you’re with] near so that you can protect them.” While the song feels short, it provides a good introduction to the album, creating duality with the slower-tempoed “stay here.”

“stay here,” the third song recorded for the album, was written about, as opposed to the attachment of “a different field,” “wanting to leave the person you’re with because you don’t want to be dragging them down and you’re anxious that you are.” This is clear through the tonality provided throughout the track with alternation between exhausted sounding verses and choruses with a more shoegaze-esque production to them. The next track, “waiting room,” experiments with an echoey effect and volume, along with having a drum track partially delayed from the vocal effects, which creates interesting layering.

The next track, “oaks park (figure something out),” is one of my personal favorites due to the ways into the mood built up by the rhythm guitar fading in and out, along with the spiraling sound of its synthesizers. This song is named after the amusement park by Selwood, and represents a personal memory of White’s. “I went to [Oaks Park] with my ex one time,” says White, who described it as “one of those moments for me when I realized that I actually enjoy finding beauty in everyday life. The big oak trees and the rain in October, that's mainly what inspired that song." The slowed-down patience of understanding the beauty of the natural world is represented well by the song’s pacing – it spends almost one third of its runtime slowly fading out.

“the distance” is one of the faster paced songs on the track, and it works well as a single, with the lines “I won’t let you go” echoing throughout the track underneath a steady rhythm and bright lead synth. It was the easiest to record for White, who “got it down really fast and felt good with it.” The creative flow came to White while “driving home to Hillsboro for dinner with my family,” he says. White “just started bouncing lines off from the car to the beat because I uploaded it to my iCloud so I could play it on my phone. And then I just started getting the lines down really quickly. And when I got home, I just recorded it in like one night, and I thought it sounded really good. And I just left it [...] I think it's just a really pleasant one." If you listen closely to the track, you can hear bird noises sampled near the end.

The next track on the album, “boundaries / repetitions,” was described by White as being the most enjoyable to make. The song has a low-toned, slow synth sound, with heavy bass drums, with warbling vocals that slowly wash over you. “I like how each one of [the tracks] has a different sound,” says White, “but [boundaries /repetitions] was my favorite making. And [...] it's a bit weirder than the rest of them and it's also my intermission track so it has a special spot in my heart.” 

The next track, “the midpoint,” is well-paced, with circling melodies and a scratchy-sounding effect, imitating the use of an old record player. After “the midpoint” is my personal favorite track, “everything you say.” This song combines the best qualities of the album to create a memorable, unique track. The song opens with a strong bass riff reminiscent of bands like Black Marble, and combines cool sampling, cuts to percussion, and lead synth to both represent and transcend the overall sound of the album. 

“lay down,” the second song White recorded, got “worked on for way longer than all the other ones,” for he “sat in Sweden for a month just tinkering with it.” The perfected sound is clear from the depth of this song, from the soft electric guitar warbling under White’s whispery vocals, which portray the duality present in the album through his lyricism: “I spent all of the time running away from you / You spent all of your time running away from you.” There’s this feeling of heaviness the song emanates as it builds layers throughout its chorus, before dropping them for its ambient outro. 

One of the highlights of the album, and the first song White recorded, is the title track “the boundary,” which was done with White’s father’s old classical guitar. The use of an acoustic instrument allows the song to stand out in its tinny sound, but it still blends well with the rest of the album. While most of the boundary except for its title track is electronic because White’s “just been moving towards more like this dreamy electronic slash shoegazey type sound. And so far, acoustic instruments haven't been the most conducive to getting that right. Or at least how I want it to sound,” for the next common occurrence! album, he’s “actually going to try to shift more into the indie folk area and pull some elements of more acoustic sounding stuff just to spice it up a little bit."

The album closes with “fir grove lp.,” a song with a heavier synth and beat than the previous song, and places the vocals more in the background while the bass melodies and synthesizer chords help close off the album in a way that feels complete yet emotionally distant. Fir Grove Loop is the name of the street White grew up on in Hillsborough, and he wrote the song while at his house during winter break. “That one’s kind of about feeling alienated from home because I lost my father,” says White, who describes the song as “a shift.” By shifting out of the album using a track that feels obscuring through the quiet mixing of vocals and distorted spoken word samples, yet nostalgic through its melodic buildup, the song creates this reflective atmosphere while also feeling lost. It leaves the listener at the boundary of emotional satisfaction and intrigue, in a way that helps the boundary project feel complete.

Overall, this album, loaded with both emotional experience, a variance of production technique, and an overall dreamy sonic atmosphere, is definitely worth listening to. Jess White encapsulates his life experience of the past year and combines it with a deep understanding of the natural world, converted to MIDI form and uploaded to your preferred streaming service under common occurrence!