Five albums. One evolving world of sound.

Digital release (available exclusively via Curious Music Bandcamp): March 6, 2026

CD Box release: May 7, 2026

Curious Music is very pleased to present Tim Story’s five-CD Smudge Box.

Spanning more than six hours of music, the box includes four previously released albums—Virga, Silent Cycles, Isola, and Rust Smudges—alongside Smudges 5: Vox, a new work created especially for this edition.

In addition to the original albums, the box also includes newly created companion pieces for Virga, Isola, and Rust Smudges, expanding these works with over an hour of previously unheard material developed specifically for this edition. Among these, "Virga H" stands as a quiet homage to Story’s departed and deeply missed friend Harold Budd.

Housed in a beautifully-designed clamshell box, Italian artist Petulia Mattioli’s striking visual presentation echoes the music’s restraint, texture, and sense of suspended time. Complete with a 20-page booklet featuring extensive notes by the composer, the edition is limited to 300 copies. Of these, a special edition of 30 includes a unique Fujifilm Instax Mini photograph – a visual expression of the smudging process - each created, signed, and numbered by Story.

The Smudges began without grand intention. While working on music for a documentary, Story sought a way to engage deeply with source material without imposing himself upon it. What emerged was not a style so much as a process: fragments of recorded sound looped, frozen, and gently transformed, allowing timbre and harmony to surface while melody and rhythm dissolve. These suspended moments unfold slowly, forming tone poems that feel at once abstract and uncannily familiar.

What binds the five works in Smudge Box is not chronology, but a shared attentiveness to duration, to the space between events, to what is revealed when sound is allowed to breathe. Each album inhabits its own emotional and conceptual space, yet all are shaped by the same sensitivity to pacing and restraint. There is a collective sense of Ma —the Japanese aesthetic concept describing the meaningful space between events: the pause, silence, or interval that gives shape and resonance to what surrounds it. Meaning here is carried not only by what is present, but by what is withheld.

The process itself is deceptively simple, yet endlessly unpredictable. Two cycles—source material and transformation—move out of phase with one another, producing results that are never quite the same twice. Story has described it less as composing in the traditional sense than as setting a system in motion, then listening closely—selecting, refining, and shaping outcomes through careful attention. What emerges feels deliberate, even inevitable, though it arises from mechanical means.

Story notes:

“It’s astonishing, how this mechanical, artificial process—a system that would produce a thousand different compositions in as many tries—seems to occasionally generate just the one that we ‘want’ to hear—one that after only a bit of attention from the listener seems nearly as meticulously crafted, and moving, as any traditionally-composed piece.”

That listener—their memory, perception, and instinct to form meaning—is central to the Smudges. Stripped of overt narrative, the music invites the mind to complete the gesture. Harmonic fields suggest orchestral weight without ever fully arriving; textures drift in slow motion, as if viewed through multiple perspectives at once. Like Cubist forms, these works do not replace their sources so much as refract them, allowing several temporal viewpoints to coexist.

Created especially for Smudge Box, Smudges 5: Vox arrives as a quiet distillation of the process. Here, Story turns to the earliest and most expressive instrument of all—the human voice. Choirs, ensembles, and soloists are absorbed into the Smudging process, their inflections and resonances stretched into hovering forms. What remains is not language or song, but presence: breath, grain, and subtle emotional weight.

Within the context of the Smudges, Vox is notable for its unusually direct emotional resonance. The voice—so deeply tied to memory, communication, and vulnerability—introduces a heightened sense of intimacy, bringing the human dimension of the project into sharper focus without abandoning restraint.

In the end, this music asks very little beyond patience. What it gives in return is space—space to notice, to reflect, and to hear anew the quiet worlds already present within sound.