Fog Chaser - "Daydream"

As a therapist, hearing how musicians have used music - and especially instrumental or ambient music - as a processing tool to turn pain into moments of cathartic beauty is one of my favorite things to come across. The Portland based Fog Chaser has a powerful story of making this manifest. With “Daydream” out on Sonder House - a rising home for this kind of meditative instrumental music, “Daydream” tracks Fog Chaser’s journey through recovery.

The press release states, “Fog Chaser is a project born of necessity. In 2018 and 2019, Evans experienced two traumatic brain injuries that took him out of commission for months at a time, resulting in a cascade of negative physical, mental, and emotional issues. Pair these injuries with a string of significant personal losses and it’s easy to understand why he spiraled even further: he lost his dad to cancer in 2019 and his father-in-law to ALS in 2020. Evans was first diagnosed with PTSD in 2018 (which he more or less ignored, to his detriment), and then diagnosed more urgently in 2020. Evans is still managing his anxiety on a daily — even hourly — basis, but it’s had a bearing on how and why this project came about. People who have experienced injuries like this, or who suffer from chronic pain, will understand the invisibility of that pain, and the accompanying fear of loss. It is a very isolating and poorly understood experience which created some very dark days.

Thanks to four years of consistent physical and psychological therapy, Evans is in a very different place today. “Those years forced me to take a close look at my priorities. I took a good chunk of time off from writing music during that period. As I re-emerged, and started to feel excited about music again, I followed my newfound clarity to try and understand, and grab onto, the things that enriched my life.” The fog began to lift, and as he continued his healing journey Evans experienced a clarity he’d never felt before. During 2020 and 2021, when collaborating with other artists was out of reach, Evans holed up to study music theory, composition, and production at Berklee College of Music. A newly self-sufficient artist, Fog Chaser came to be.