Two records, two sets of constraints: Brendan Eder’s Cape Cod Cottage and Therapy limited repress available via In Sheep’s Clothing.

The story behind Cape Cod Cottage carries the quiet allure of a record buried for decades and found by chance. A retired dentist named Edward Blankman with a budget to afford session musicians and a recording studio. The early 1970s. Private press cover art. Elegant, minimalist jazz written in solitude and left behind, only later to end up in suburban thrift shop bins.

Cape Cod Cottage isn’t a recovered artifact but one carefully constructed by Echo Park composer Brendan Eder and released in 2021. Blankman never lived, but the world built around him does and only grows more expansive with time. And although it’s a playful conceit, the liner notes, period photographs, and hushed deliberateness of the music work in concert as a framework for grief. Eder created Blankman’s story as a way of channeling loss, letting fiction hold emotions that autobiography might flatten.

In interviews, Eder doesn’t talk about inspiration so much as persistence. “For my ‘personal’ work, I often end up creating the most difficult, meticulous things,” he said in 2019, four years after his debut album, Brendan Eder Ensemble. “It’s like a curse, but I’m proud of everything I make.” Eder described writing every part for a chamber ensemble, going to elaborate lengths to produce stop-motion and analog-effect music videos, choosing the slowest, most labor-intensive path available.

Over time, that approach hardened into a philosophy. “My mantra has become ‘nobody cares.’ I tell that to anyone who is worried about what other people think about them or their art.” Asked what he’s most proud of, Eder focuses on his drive. “Maybe sticking to it. Yeah, sticking to it.”

His album Therapy, released quietly a year before Cape Cod Cottage and only newly repressed on vinyl, approaches the same interior terrain without narrative camouflage. Rather, it sprung from another kind of problem to solve: “What would Aphex Twin do with a chamber ensemble?” The record trades in a different kind of constraint, placing synthetic logic inside acoustic bodies. It also features two Aphex Twin covers, including #17. He and his ensemble performed it (and many more pieces) a few years ago at the First Baptist Church of Glendale.

Strings, reeds, and piano behave like circuitry, repeating figures until they warp under their own precision. Eder treats synthetic music less as a genre than as a set of problems to work through, translating digital rigor into physical touch. On vinyl, the album feels newly legible.

Pre-orders are now open at In Sheep’s Clothing for the vinyl editions of Cape Cod Cottage and Therapy. These are small repress runs, the kind that tend to disappear once word starts to travel. Retail shops interested in stocking the records can get in touch with us at [email protected] to ask about wholesale pricing and availability.