If you are looking for utility, do not buy my NFTs. If you are looking to speculate on something you can later flip for profit, do not buy my NFTs. If you are looking for something that gives you insider access to a gated community, do not buy my NFTs.

There are other places you can go for those things. If that’s what you’re looking for -- and that’s okay -- this is not your place.

If you are looking for connection, if you are looking to support my work, if you are looking to take a peek into my point of view, one snapshot at a time -- then this is your place. I’d love to have you as a collector. If you own an NFT by me, you support me in doing the one and only one thing that’s helped me survive this world: to create.

I started writing music the summer after eighth grade. I lived with my family in Dhahran Aramco, a small, gated, residential compound in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia (الشرقية). It had all the characteristics of a small colonial project: by-design racism, class and nationality-based hierarchy, exploitation of immigrants, a privileged minority (at the time many white, many American) maintaining and exerting a disproportionate amount of control over the environment around them.

If I learned one thing from my upbringing, it’s that I’m some small person in some grand, suspicious scheme.

It was also the place where I wrote my first song, experienced my first kiss, tried my first sip of alcohol (moonshine, also eighth grade), snuck out and got caught, was made to swear on the Quran at two in the morning that I did not lose my virginity that night. It was a transient home of permanence -- and it is this very contradiction I seem to carry with me, silently, forever.

A huge part of my journey revolves around acceptance of what has come to be my work -- to express through small acts of creation. Usually, my medium of choice is music. This is by no means an easy thing for me. It’s not a “hobby” or something like that. It’s more like a war, a constant struggle, which keeps me continually anxious, restless, dissatisfied. I’ve reached that life stage where, when I glance backward, I see flickers of what I was either too preoccupied to notice or too preoccupied to preserve. I’ve lost relationships to this shit, I’ve lost entire periods of time to this shit, I’ve lost my sanity to this shit. Yet it is this and only this that persists. That fact, I have come to accept. I know that I will live with it and that I will die with it. The art is what happened, what remains.

If you got this far, I want to thank you first and foremost. I plan to release my genesis Catalog record this Friday, March 18th. It’s called “Two Suns”. The drop microsite, designed by 10 High Design is live now. Reserve price is 0.5 ETH. The first collector will receive a one-time-only physical care package created by 10 High Design and yours truly. Details to come.

Thank you. Salam. Peace.

--Reef