hollowsummer is the sound of endless August, where every memory is warped by heat shimmer and every silence feels like static. Static Chapel captures ephemeral suburban hauntology: cracked pavement, forgotten malls, text messages that sting harder in the humidity. It’s both warm and decayed, nostalgic yet suffocating—like remembering the best and worst of summer all at once.

LEFT ON READ IN JULY

eSTRANGEd couSINs: Augmented Ghost Songs and the Blood That Binds
For most of his life, Daniel didn’t know half his family. His father left too early to remember, cutting him off from cousins, uncles, and an entire branch of his own bloodline.
The gap might have stayed empty forever—except for music.

At nine years old, Daniel found an acoustic guitar in his grandfather’s garage. By sixteen, fate finally crossed his path with cousins Timmy and Kenny. Timmy sang, Kenny played keys, Daniel was on guitar, with Joey on drums and John on bass. They recorded on hissy four-tracks and eight-tracks, capturing songs that felt alive in a way nothing else did.
But like so many young bands, they split apart. Life pulled them in different directions.

Years later, after serving in the Army, Daniel got a call from his mom: “Danny, I think your dad died.” Obituaries confirmed it. Reaching out to Timmy on Facebook, Daniel sent his condolences—only to find Timmy didn’t know yet. Timmy’s reply hit even harder: “Sit down. I’ve got something to tell you.”

A few years earlier, Timmy and Kenny had been in a motorcycle accident. Kenny didn’t survive. Timmy was left badly injured, carrying a grief that never stopped echoing.
And then Timmy said the words that would start everything again: “We should get together.”

When they did, it was natural—musicians falling back into a language only they spoke. Timmy brought a notebook full of lyrics. Daniel brought his acoustic guitar. They walked five minutes through the woods to the boardwalk near Daniel’s house, sometimes at night, sometimes at dawn, sometimes in that strange orange light before evening. They played raw, unplanned, straight-from-the-heart jams, recording everything on a Samsung phone.

Years passed. Staying in touch was hard—they were, after all, estranged cousins. But Daniel never let go of those recordings. He experimented—mic’ing percussion, adding backing vocals, trying to polish the hiss and wind noise. They were priceless but imperfect.

Then came the shift.
AI music was starting to emerge. Out of curiosity, Daniel fed Timmy’s lyrics into a generator just to hear them sung. The results were good, but they weren’t theirs—the guitar wasn’t his, the feel wasn’t right. So he shelved it.

Fast forward a couple years: Daniel checks back in on Suno, and something’s changed. It could now process his music—uploading up to eight minutes, following his guitar work instead of replacing it. He had an epiphany.

He uploaded those old boardwalk sessions—the hiss, the strums, the cracked phone mic—and watched them come alive. Timmy’s lyrics were there, Daniel’s melodies were there, but now the recordings breathed. The wind and static were gone, replaced with clarity. The phrasing followed his playing exactly. For the first time, the ghosts in those songs stepped into the light.

Daniel doesn’t call it AI music.
He calls it augmented music—born from real moments, real grief, real family, rescued from bad recordings and given a second life.

That’s what eSTRANGEd couSINs is: a band that plays with the living and the dead at once. The catalog—Every Song is a Coffin, Birds of Prey, Ashes for Eyes, Apple of Sodom, Baxter in a Jar, and Unwanted Orphans and Dead Concepts—is part memoir, part séance, and part survival.

Every song is a ghost they refused to bury.

Daniel hopes that one day, he and Timmy will stand together again with a phone and a guitar, recording something new under the open sky—knowing it can be reborn into something even greater. Until then, he asks you to keep listening, drop a like, share the music, and maybe—just maybe—he’ll post the original phone recordings so you can hear exactly where it all began.

This isn’t about filling a SoundCloud page.
It’s about honoring Timmy’s poetry.
It’s about honoring Kenny’s life.
It’s about keeping family alive through song.

R.I.P. Kennith Lucier
God bless. Godspeed. We hope you enjoy.

LEFT ON READ IN JULY

Pukin' Chicken Records