For Your Consideration
Thank you for taking the time to visit, listen, and spend some time with the music.
This has been a remarkably creative year for Rena Jones, founder of Cartesian Binary—one that brings together many threads of a career spent moving fluidly between artist, composer, producer, engineer, performer, and collaborator.
At the heart of this year’s work is Love Letters, Rena’s seventh solo album: an intimate and deeply personal record built from layered strings, electronics, live instrumentation, and the kind of detailed sonic world-building that has long defined her work. Alongside it are her contributions to Younger Brother’s Mutually Assured Distraction; I Belong To Nowhere, At Home In This World, and her recordings, including Dark Knight of the Soul, Within With Out, and You Have Always Been Enough.
Taken together, these projects reveal the breadth of Rena’s work—from composition and intricate, emotive string arrangements to engineering, production, remixing, electronic music, and collaboration.
Different projects, different roles, but all connected by a shared attention to detail, emotional depth, and an enduring curiosity about the possibilities of sound—showcasing the multidisciplinary nature of Rena’s work and the scope of her contributions to music during this voting season.
We’ve gathered the music, credits, and stories behind these works here in one place for your consideration and enjoyment.
Thank you for being here, and for giving the work your time and consideration.
From the team at Cartesian Binary
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Rena Jones — Love Letters — FYC
Rena Jones & David Last - Folding Grace Into Empty Spaces
FYC - Rena Jones - LOVE LETTERS - New Age, Ambient, or Chant Album
FYC - Rena Jones - LOVE LETTERS - Engineered Album, Non-Classical
FYC - Rena Jones - DARK KNIGHT OF THE SOUL - Record Of The Year
FYC - Rena Jones - DARK KNIGHT OF THE SOUL - Dance/Electronic Recording
FYC - Rena Jones - DARK KNIGHT OF THE SOUL - Instrumental Composition
FYC - Rena Jones - WITHIN WITH OUT - Dance/Electronic Recording
FYC - Rena Jones & David Last - FOLDING GRACE INTO EMPTY SPACES - Dance/Electronic Remix
FYC - Rena Jones - YOU HAVE ALWAYS BEEN ENOUGH - Music Video
Rena Jones — Love Letters — FYC
Love Letters is a sonic memoir by Rena Jones, shaped by the raw, transformative experience of receiving a recent ADHD diagnosis. In past works, she has explored esoteric concepts—Driftwood traced the life-cycle of a tree, Indra’s Web examined the interconnectedness of reality, and Caesura lingered in the liminal spaces between. Love Letters turns inward, tracing the quiet terrain of memory, misalignment, resilience, and the radical act of offering compassion to one’s former self.
Written, performed, produced, and mixed entirely by Jones—aside from the upright bass on “You Have Always Been Enough,” performed by the immensely gifted Yonaton Elkayam—the album stands as a living portrait of her multidimensional artistry. Modular synths, programmed beats, and live drums pulse beneath the surface, while 6-string fretless bass moves alongside warm analog and synth bass. Cello, violin, and viola carve emotional contours through the mix, and analog and modular synths shimmer with introspective glow. Every texture becomes a page in the letter—tender, unfiltered, vulnerable, yet grounded and true.
At its heart, Love Letters is exactly what its name suggests: a message of recognition and forgiveness to the artist’s younger self, and an offering to anyone who has walked through the confusion of living undiagnosed—the dissonance of feeling slightly out of sync with the world—and the profound relief that comes with finally understanding why. It is a shared breath of understanding, a hand extended across time and experience.
Across its arc—opening with the uplifting ballad “Within With Out” and descending into the shadowed depths of “Dark Knight of the Soul”—the album navigates loss, trauma, revelation, and integration. It dissolves the distance between past and present selves, even featuring a rare, unreleased solo performance of Jones on looping cello, crafted by her future self as a musical letter to the person she once was. Intricate rhythms weave through lush harmonic layers, creating a soundscape that is both cathartic and expansive.
Love Letters is not just a record—it is a gentle reconciliation, a moment of clarity, and a celebration of finally being able to see oneself with honesty and love.
FYC - Rena Jones - LOVE LETTERS - Engineered Album, Non-Classical
Rena Jones
Love Letters — For Your Consideration
Engineered Album, Non-Classical
A Texas native, Rena Jones began her musical journey with classical violin in the second grade, later discovering composition and electronic music as a teenager. Drawn to the creative freedom of electronic sound, she pursued formal training in audio engineering at SAE Ex’pression College for Digital Arts in Emeryville, California. After graduating, Jones became immersed in the San Francisco music community, moving fluidly between the roles of audio engineer, producer, and studio musician.
That rare combination of musical sensitivity and technical expertise has shaped Jones’s career. Her engineering and performance credits include influential recordings such as STS9’s Artifact, Beats Antique’s debut album Tribal Derivations, edIT’s Certified Air Raid Material, and projects with Emancipator. She also contributed to the development of Pro Tools audio software at Avid before relocating to Portland, Oregon, in 2006.
A multi-instrumentalist, Jones works with cello, violin, percussion, synthesizers, drum machines, and modular systems. Across seven solo albums, she has developed a distinctive language that brings the warmth and emotional nuance of acoustic strings into conversation with electronic rhythm, analog bass, and synthesis. Her compositions explore nature, philosophy, reincarnation, and the interconnectedness of reality—ideas expressed not only through melody and performance, but through the intimate details of sound itself.
Jones has always lived in both worlds: the musician responding emotionally to a performance and the engineer understanding how to preserve that emotion in a recording. That dual perspective is at the heart of Love Letters. Jones recorded, engineered, and mixed the album in its entirety, shaping every element—from its strings and electronic textures to its spatial depth, dynamics, and low-end architecture. Rather than treating engineering as a separate technical stage, she approached it as an essential part of the album’s composition and storytelling.
Her experience overseeing a record label has further deepened that perspective. Working closely with artists throughout the recording and mixing process, Jones has helped guide projects toward clarity, cohesion, and emotional impact while protecting each artist’s individual voice. That same care defines Love Letters: a deeply personal record whose sonic identity was built from the ground up by the artist who composed and performed it.
For your consideration, Love Letters represents the full scope of Rena Jones’s life in sound—as an engineer, producer, composer, label director, and multi-instrumentalist.
On Love Letters, Jones brings decades of musical instinct and technical mastery into a single, unified vision. The result is an immersive and meticulously crafted album—engineered with precision, shaped by experience, and driven by a deeply personal creative vision.
FYC - Rena Jones - YOU HAVE ALWAYS BEEN ENOUGH - Music Video
Rena Jones - You Have Always Been Enough
Younger Brother
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Mutually Assured Distraction
Younger Brother — Mutually Assured Distraction
Released on Twisted Records U.K.
FYC - Younger Brother - MUTUALLY ASSURED DISTRACTION - Album Of The Year
FYC - Younger Brother - MUTUALLY ASSURED DISTRACTION - Dance/Electronic Album
FYC - Younger Brother - MUTUALLY ASSURED DISTRACTION - Engineered Album, Non-Classical
FYC - Younger Brother & Mirabelle Rose - AT HOME IN THIS WORLD - Song Of The Year
FYC - Younger Brother & Mirabelle Rose - AT HOME IN THIS WORLD - Alternative Music Performance
FYC - Younger Brother - A PARADOX OF WITCHES - Dance/Electronic Recording