Six Missing

Sometimes we need music that stops us in our tracks and reminds us to connect with the moment we’re currently experiencing, and that’s exactly what the compositions of Six Missing provide. The new music from ambient artist TJ Dumser is a reflection not only on our current life and times but the totality of existence itself. The Austin-based Dumser began releasing music under the name Six Missing in 2017—a moniker that possesses a literally otherworldly meaning to him. “One of our members had a studio in Pennsylvania, and one of the weekends we’d been out there we were recording for 14 hours and were exhausted,” he recalls on the incident that inspired him to take on the namesake. “We went back to the cabin, everybody went to bed, and I heard the front door to the cabin open. As I went to see what it was, I was frozen and felt this searing pain in my back, as well as an endless sadness. I was having a supernatural experience, and it really shook me.” Further research revealed that the cabin was near the site of the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Brandywine, in which six participants remain unaccounted for—and, when combined with Dumser’s hair-raising experience, the name Six Missing came to be. “I thought it was a great way to pay tribute to that experience, which had this supernatural tilt that was also in touch with the human experience,” he explains. “It’s what I aim to do with this project in general—to usher people to go beyond what our day-to-day life looks like.”