Only 30 tapes made for purchase. Released with Underwater Peoples.
Lemon-color cassette tape with 3-panel Risograph-printed J-card artwork. Includes homemade fold-out insert with lyrics.

"An album that sounds markedly more mature than his previous records. Fort/da...rewards repeat-listeners patient enough to appreciate its lo-fi yet sophisticated ambition. ...its songs and their homegrown intimacy provide a bit of light in spite of our dark reality." — PopMatters

"Fort/da, his first album in seven years, [is] one of the lovely surprises of this year. It’s a quiet album of hushed acoustic guitars, fluctuating synths, and brushed drumwork. ...Cedermark is a great artist" — No Ripcord

Andrew King Cedermark is a guitar player and schoolteacher who lives on a mountain off the coast of New York City. While releasing records on the venerable Underwater Peoples label — such as GarageBand barn burner Moon Deluxe (2010) and the ambitious Home Life (2013) — Andrew toured and performed with such revues as Titus Andronicus, Real Estate, Japanese Breakfast, and spent a good amount of time hiking around New Jersey. Like his celebrated Moon Deluxe, Andrew's new album Fort/da (2020) collects several years worth of home recordings in a sweet little package.

The lyrics to Andrew's new record, Fort/da, ruminate vaguely, and only somewhat, on the idea that our "adult identities" are sad attempts to veil the traumas of early childhood. Some songs prophesy the specific dates, times, and details of traumatic experiences to come, and ruminate vaguely on how these will shape us thereafter. Finally, a couple songs ruminate vaguely on the nature of romantic love. It was mostly recorded on an iPad.

The title, Fort/da, comes from Freud, who describes working with a boy who likes to toss his toys as far away from himself as possible, each time he does so issuing “a loud, long-drawn-out 'o-o-o-o', accompanied by an expression of interest and satisfaction.” Freud and the child’s mother think the kid is trying to say “fort,” which is German for “away.” One day the child finds a wooden reel with a piece of string tied around it. “What [the child] did was to hold the reel by the string and very skillfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive 'o-o-o-o'. He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful 'da' ['there’].”

Fort/da, the album, is about life in world that defies expectations, about what happens when the string breaks, which in turn breaks the world, or when you thought there was a string but there is no string, and the object flies away, when you realize, mid-act, that an action is irreversible.

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