Ty Rex

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a final period of darkness, then the light 🌱 listen here & come back to read

recorded June 20, 2024
released June 20, 2025 (summer solstice)
artwork: self-portrait by Ty Rex
“a final period of darkness, then the light”
is a celebration of completion, or finally reaching transition -
from confusion to clarity
from loss to new life
from sickness to health
a grateful farewell, a welcome to the future

This was my last recording, a farewell, to the piano that carried me through some of my darkest years of health and survival, documented in my last album, “Movement”. The piano and I did not get along for a very long time – it was difficult and unpredictable to play, uneven and noisy. The innumerable times I yelled in frustration after a ruined phrase… the amount of times, on the same bench, I realized my fingers were losing dexterity, and my hands their strength and feeling, sometimes unable to play at all.

But together, we endured and learned to speak. You learn to surrender to the nature of a thing, all while asking it to bend to yours. I learned to let go of my performance, my image, of sounding good - all devotional acts for which my body became a vessel of healing in relationship to this instrument.

(I will soon share more from this period in a collection called “The Body”.)

This recording is the last time we sat together, in quiet reverence and gratitude for the journey, just as I’d offer to any person. I thanked her for all of the hours we spent alone, in frustration, in freedom, learning the ropes of living again.

Now, I am in a further life - as are you, wherever you have come from, or are now saying farewell to.

Most of my music has come from trying to make sense of the darkness. Now, much of it is made in the clarity and weightlessness of the light. I struggle over the words “darkness” and “light” because of my Christian upbringing… these were weighty, moral, life or death terms. Now they are sacred realities I try to embrace equally, but even still, our lives are a collective journey of realization, of clarity, perspective, understanding, liberty, freedom… stepping out of darkness, toward the light.

I hope that in this work, you feel a sense of completion, or if it is not yet arrived, your listening will become a prayer and promise for one. These promises are everywhere: the earth, sun, moon and stars… the very nature of light - all cyclical realities to remind you that whatever darkness you’re in is temporary.

- Ty Rex