A Day in the Life: Social Distancing with David D'Angelo and MayDay

by - May 08, 2020


David D'Angelo: 
While on lockdown there are a few key ways I am staying sane, or thereabouts. The first one involves keys, specifically my Roland Juno G synth which I use to create the majority of my sounds when producing tracks...which brings me to the next thing I’m doing, making more beats! I’m trying to see how many beats I can make over this whole lockdown period. All of these days sort of blend together so I’m just naming all the beats I make on lockdown as the date I made them, i.e 3-15-20 (that’s a particularly interesting one btw). It’s an auditory diary through beats...MayDay is already helping me fill out some new pages so we’ll see what we come up with. :)

I’m also teaching music and science lessons over Skype/Zoom/Google Hangouts, the whole nine yards. To give some back story, last fall I moved out to San Francisco from North Carolina to teach environmental education, and have been teaching gardening and sustainability at an elementary school. From one week to the next in mid-March everything shut down, and since then I have been still working remotely trying to write new curriculum, communicate with teachers to coordinate video calls, and I am creating video lessons for the kids as well! I just filmed a video of myself planting a Fava Bean seed on my back porch...I am hoping the kids still have some way of connecting with nature at their homes!

Spending time in nature has always been an important part of my life. Now that I’m on quarantine living in a city that has almost one million people in just under 49 square miles, it feels even more necessary for me to carve out time to get away from it all. To do something as simple as touch a tree, to remind me of what is still solid and rooted in this topsy turvy reality we are all in, is proving invaluable to my well being.

If I don’t have enough time for a nature excursion on my bike one day (I love biking), then I take the stairs up to the roof of my apartment complex. I can stare at landscapes for hours and just imagine what it would be like to fly...my imagination is reinforced by the various birds flying around from rooftop to rooftop.


Mark “MayDay” Edwards: 
So even before the official Stay-at-Home began, my job was gracious enough and had the foresight to equip us to work from home, (I work for a tech health company and chat with folks about their wellness and such, it's pretty dope) so once the order was in place I already had a bit of a routine going. I start all of my mornings off with something grounding, whether that's been breathing exercises, meditation, or some jazz. I find that it helps me set the trajectory of my day and with so much else going on, forming a steady path for my own mental and emotional well-being has been super helpful.

A continual key to my balance is, of course, making music! David has been lacing me with some rather ill soundscapes to say the least! My creativity has always been a major outlet for me and I often tell people I don't know what I would do if I did not have music. I've been writing more often and have tons of new material I'm crafting to prospectively put out during this time inside. Speaking of inside, I've been taking the time to do more meditation whether indoors or out in nature during my many, many walks. Finding a source of inner peace and rootedness can be tough during times when things seem to be their most chaotic.

Like many of us, I had tons of shows and video game playing to catch up on so at first I was filling my evenings with nothing but screen time, which turned out to be tough to maintain if I wanted some form of a sleep schedule. So now I've been trying to balance my productivity with my leisure..how that's working? We'll see!

While practicing social distancing, watch our latest music video for "Priceless Commodity":

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