josh mason
kicking a dark horse

catalog 012
release 26 june 2026
duration 54:13
formats FOLIO + digital
edition 300

josh mason modular synthesizer

The third release in Greyfade’s FOLIO format—a full-length music edition in hardcover book form—is Josh Mason’s Kicking A Dark Horse.

For his Greyfade debut, musician and sound artist Josh Mason presents an ambitious multi-modal work articulated across sound and text: a 9-track electronic album alongside a book-length work of experimental writing.

Across both forms, Kicking A Dark Horse is governed by controlled instability—chaotic structures that cohere without repetition and evolve without resolution. The text unfolds in fragments—part diary, part landscape study, part fever dream—extending the disjunctive, textural logic of the music into literary terrain rarely inhabited by a music edition.

Florida-based musician and sound artist Josh Mason is known for a deeply personal approach to modular synthesis, guitar, and electronics, developed over more than a decade of recorded work and extended into the design of his own instruments. With Kicking A Dark Horse, that approach reaches its most personal—and most elaborate—form to date.

Kicking A Dark Horse is an electronic record made entirely with modular synthesizers—nine tracks of textural, unhurried music that carries the grain and particularity of a place rather than the atmospheric sheen of a mood. It feels improvised without being formless and composed without being rigid, sitting in a space that Mason locates between the looping structures of much ambient music and the open-ended drift of purely generative work. The distinction he draws is between randomness and chaos: the former truly unpredictable, the latter producing structures that evolve and cohere without ever fully stabilizing.

Against the pastoral universalism that has long defined the genre's surface—the morning light, the ocean breeze, the deliberately placeless—Mason positions something more specific, more unsettled, more willing to let darkness in. The landscapes that anchor Kicking A Dark Horse are the highways, coastlines, motels, and peripheral spaces of Florida: hyper-local, particular, lived. Track titles function as stage directions rather than descriptions. "No Vacancy" is not decorative. It describes a loose bulb connection in a hotel sign along a stretch of beach—the word flickering in and out, the sign cycling between states.

That image is not incidental. The album was built around a modular synthesizer framework that operates on streams of binary data, a system whose internal logic resists intuitive control and, by Mason's own account, made no immediate sense to him. That opacity was precisely the point. "It's a self-imposed impediment," Mason says of the approach—a deliberate strategy of working against a tool set that doesn't yield easily, as a way of forcing outcomes that surprise even their maker. It is an approach consistent across his body of work: the selection of a constraint as a compositional act in itself. "Most of the composition exists before I ever touch the equipment—right down to track titles, the album name."

The record's unusual textures—its dusty clicks, phase glitches, and moments of lo-fi grain—are not accidents of process but consequences of deliberate abuse: oscillators clocked far below their operational thresholds, bit-depth data routed through mismatched converters, delay lines treated as percussive instruments rather than atmospheric wash.

Mason performs the material live, conducting the system by hand—manually stepping sequences in and out, adjusting divisions on the fly—producing music that sounds, in his words, like "spinning plates": all the elements running at once, and the recording beginning the moment he feels them arrive at the right momentum simultaneously. Sequences expand and contract, rhythms slip out of alignment, and fragments recur in altered forms—close enough to familiarity to suggest repetition, but never identical.

The book, subtitled "a nonlinear travelogue of the states of Florida," applies to writing the same approach Mason brings to sound: discontinuous, associative, resistant to closure—a nonlinear sensibility pressed into an inherently linear form. Scenes arrive and dissolve without transition; timelines collapse into one another; documentary detail coexists with outright fabrication, and the seam between them is, by design, impossible to locate.

The text is not an essay about the music, nor a document of the process behind it. It is another instance of the same underlying sensibility—two sides of the same coin, as Mason has described it, co-conceived from the outset and intended to be experienced simultaneously. "There is room in both the music and the text," he says, "for the other one to step in." Kicking A Dark Horse is not an album with a book, or a book about an album. It is one thing, and it asks to be encountered that way.


produced by josh mason & joseph branciforte
mastered by joseph branciforte at greyfade studio

text & layout by josh mason
edited by joseph branciforte

FOLIO cover design by josh mason
FOLIO interior design by joseph branciforte