Regular Humans
Northern New Mexico, 2018–2024
Three albums · Thousands of hours · Many rooms
Two people, five years,
a Tascam in the middle of the room
Regular Humans started the way most things do — by accident.
Nick and I met on a remote mountain road outside El Valle, New Mexico. My son and I had pulled over with a blown tire and no good options when a silver Subaru rolled up and a man jumped out with a compressor. Over the whine of the pump, he mentioned he worked at a music store in Santa Fe. We were just a few turns below my house, so once the tire held air we led him up the dirt road. He came by the following week to play music. That was the beginning of a five-year, weekly collaboration.
Regular Humans was a two-person band — Matthew Williams and Nick Hudson — that hosted a rotating cast of musicians and soundmakers throughout five years of intensive work in northern New Mexico. Their plans to record in a studio never materialized, constrained by finances and lured by home recording. Most recordings were made on a Tascam DR-05X, a two-channel recorder set in the middle of whatever room they were in at the time.
The spaces moved with the seasons — clustering near the wood stove in winter, fleeing the afternoon sun in summer. They moved from house to house: a remote mountain village at 8,500 feet, briefly to Española, Nick’s living room, and finally one of the two rooms in a tiny casita in Pojoaque. Mics were strung from hooks on vigas or laid on the nearest box.
We were beset by the pure joy of playing, the ecstatic moment of expression with no further goal or aspiration. Most rehearsals, we would start with a warm-up jam that, many times, functioned as a sort of emotional exorcism.
They went through so many guitars, recording interfaces, drum kits, amps, cables, pedals, and mics that an exhaustive list would read like the inventory of a small music store. Towards the end, they tended toward Matthew on bass and Nick on electric guitar.
Perhaps the spirit of this time had less to do with output — you can hear how these are not perfect takes — but about creating safety for experiments in expression. Their most heady ideas had to do with the way that overtones would emerge from chaotic, repeated signals, and what could emerge from spontaneous, improvised, free-form moments of musical expression.
On a more practical level, their conversations were about groceries. They built cabinets together, replaced engine mounts in cars in the middle of the night, and rode out the vicissitudes of relationships, career paths, and rotating musical collaborators.
What you hear in these recordings, through the failed attempts, the spoken-out-loud stage directions, and the musical experimentation, is a deepening of trust — between and within two people. That sounds chaotic, and noisy, and has an occasional harmonic resolution. Read more →
The archive came back into focus in the summer of 2025, when a return trip to New Mexico and a reunion session with Nick sent everything into motion.
In the summer of 2025, I went back to New Mexico for the first time in a year. Nick and his wife hosted me. We played together again almost immediately, and something about that visit — the landscape, the reunion, the ease of falling back into the music — sent me into the archive. There were thousands of hours of recordings from our five years of work, most of them unheard by anyone. This page, and these three albums, are what came out of that.
Music takes the shape
of the room where it is made
Each room had its own acoustic signature — heavy adobe walls, tile floors, intervening sofas and chairs. Each space also carried an emotional signature for those who were there. You can identify which room within seconds of a recording: not just from the acoustic signature, but from the kind of musical choices made in response to each space.
The El Valle Living Room
El Valle, NM — 8,500 ft
Red carpet, wood panel walls, a wood stove critical in brutal winters. Nearly wall-sized picture windows overlooking the enormous valley below the Truchas peaks. This is where they first started working together, and where “True Form” was born the day Nick arrived for practice and heard a new riff for the first time.
The Aqua Bedroom
El Valle, NM — summer recording space
Walls and ceiling painted aqua blue. A hand-me-down drum kit occasionally populated by a local musician. This is where they first experimented with multitracking, sometimes sealed against the heat with trapped cool air. “Illumination” took shape here. “Pensive River” was layered here, take after take.
The Española Hallway
Española, NM — transitional space
A narrow apartment built onto the side of the original adobe house. Hard parallel surfaces — the worst acoustic environment on paper. They discovered it had perfect natural reverb. This is where “Texture → I’ll Keep It With Mine” was recorded in one continuous take, translating a single word prompt from a Santa Fe art collective into music.
The Pojoaque Casita
Pojoaque, NM — final home
One of two rooms in a tiny casita, the last and most productive space. A week in spring of 2023 when you could hear Regular Humans across the fields through the open windows. This is where “Transfiguration,” “Charlie Parker,” and most of the final archive was captured, and where Kate Barnett brought drums and harmonies.
Three albums,
2025–2026
Regular
The first release from the archive — twelve tracks drawn from sessions in the El Valle living room, the aqua bedroom, a live party in Santa Fe, and points in between. The album opens with “Charlie Parker” and closes with a song whose final line was improvised in the moment it was first sung, a detail that became so central to how the band worked that the song acquired a second, unofficial name: “Mushrooms in Africa.”
Humans
The second volume of archive material, drawn from rooms and sessions that the first album couldn’t contain — the Española hallway with its accidental reverb, the aqua bedroom sessions in summer heat, the recordings that kept surfacing as the archive was excavated and kept demanding to be heard.
In the End
The final album, and the one that came closest to a full band. Kate Barnett joined the casita sessions in the spring of 2023, bringing drums and harmonies to recordings made during a week when you could hear Regular Humans across the fields of Pojoaque through the open windows. The title track was written by Nick Hudson.
Session recordings
and live performances
The writing
behind the archive
The story of how Regular Humans started is also the story of how Nick and I met — on a remote mountain road, over a blown tire and a borrowed compressor. The rest of it goes from there.
Uncertain Beginnings
How the band started, and a reunion session that sent me back into the archive
Regular Human Memory
A return trip to New Mexico and what it did to five years of recordings
The Rooms Where Regular Humans Lived
Living inside thousands of hours of recordings, and what the architecture remembers
I Lost It
A live show from 2022 and the search for authentic expression
Revolution Blues and the American Psyche
On Neil Young, on the tradition Regular Humans was working inside, and on what the song still means
The archive lives here.
The work continues at Khoma Brut.
Regular Humans concluded in 2024. These three albums are what survived the excavation — not everything recorded, but everything worth sharing. Matthew Williams continues making music as Khoma Brut.
Hats from the archive era
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