“Solstice” (2025)

December 18, 2025

Today I’m releasing a short track that I wrote and recorded with Joe Branciforte almost two years ago. The track is called Solstice. I have been sitting on it for a good bit of time, waiting for the right moment to put it out into the world, for the album to be done. But the album isn’t done, and it won’t be done for a few more months. Still, I’m releasing this track now for a few reasons. 

I’m a second-year grad student in music at Brown. This was my first semester of teaching. The first of what I hoped, and still hope, would be many semesters—if I’m lucky, many years—of teaching, mentoring, thinking about and making music with others. 

The class was a large one, an intro to electronic music. The 28 students I worked with most directly, in smaller sections sandwiched between lectures, were primarily freshmen and sophomores.

When I left Brown early to fly to my family home on Tuesday, I kept thinking about those students. I kept thinking of the stories they’re sharing right now, texts and phone calls made all over the world, some of them back with loved ones already, others unable to leave campus early or at all. Stories of shock, confusion, numbness, grief, anger, resilience, kindness, bravery. Their families, their high school friends. 

My mind wandered back to memories from my own teenage-hood, back in Colorado Springs. 

I went to a high school that also suffered profoundly from gun violence, if in a different way. At the end of junior spring, just shy of ten years ago, we lost five students in the course of about a month to a suicide “contagion,” including a close friend from our niche little circle of math/band nerds. 

It feels important to me and to the memory of our friends and classmates to acknowledge that the nature of gun violence can take many forms, and that they are systemically interrelated.

Needless to say, that grieving high schooler in Colorado Springs never once thought that ten years later, she’d be consoling her own students on the other side of the country during her very first semester of teaching. Students whose lives have now too been irreversibly entangled with the horrific reality of gun violence. 

So I’m releasing this track now for my students—and my classmates, my friends, my teachers, from Colorado Springs to Providence. I hope it might help you reset, refocus, or even just pass the time. I hope it can be a small token of my gratitude for the opportunity to learn alongside you. 

I’m also releasing this track now because of the ways my three roommates at Brown have been reminding me how far even the smallest gesture of tenderness can go. 

When I think back to that Saturday night years from now, it will probably be hard to forget sheltering in our living room with the lights off, barricading our doors the best we could, the sirens and helicopters everywhere overhead, the frustration of ads and paywalls blocking live media coverage of the situation, how the proximity of the gunshots made real our conversations about how we’d escape if we had to, where we’d run, if we should carry makeshift weapons…

What I really hope I won’t forget, though, is how Trang made mapo tofu in the dark so at least we wouldn’t be hungry while we were sheltering in place. And how the next day, Victor gave me his cup of ginger tea so I could unfreeze my hands when we were returning from the snowy vigil. And how the day after that, Jacob gifted me a soft hoodie that I’ve kept wrapped around me ever since.

So I’m releasing this track now for my roommates. I never thought I’d say it, but I’d love to live in a world where our broken laundry, non-functional microwave and unresponsive landlord were the biggest of our problems. 

And finally, I’m releasing this track now because we are almost at the solstice, which is its namesake. Winter solstice is the inflection point where the sun may still continue to set way too early and the day-to-day may remain below freezing, but we know that with every passing day we’re gaining just a minute or two of sunshine, and those minutes will add up because they inevitably have to, and sometimes that knowledge is all we need to keep going. 

Still, I think it has taken me a long time to trust in these longer trajectories and longer cycles and seasons in my own life and in the world.

I know that maybe you have now read all of this and very little of it has actually been about my piece. Suffice it to say that I made Solstice at a time when I had no choice but to learn resilience. During that time, when I was writing it, I imagined as clearly as I could what I felt like the last time I’d felt free and at peace and lovingly curious about the world. I put it into this piece of music because I quite literally needed it. 

So I’m releasing this track now for myself, as well as for all of you. 

I hope that maybe this little offering can bring you four minutes and 29 seconds of lightness, energy, peace, contemplation, or simple presence in this moment.

-Jess

Jessica Shand, composition, production, flutes, vocals
Joseph Branciforte, composition, production, engineering, mix

Cover art by Beaux Salix

solo projects

Transmutations (2025)

With influences ranging from the pioneering sound design experiments of Suzanne Ciani to the futuristic minimalism of SOPHIE, Jessica Shand’s debut release leverages flutes as a laboratory for sound, unraveling one-second-or-less samples of flute sound into vast perceptual landscapes across 12 vignettes. Written and recorded at greyfade studio with producer and engineer Joseph Branciforte and independently released on February 21, 2025, it is available in full on Bandcamp and Soundcloud.

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Apophenial (2024)

A collaboration with composer and music technologist Christopher Lock (Ex_Log.Records 2024).