Themed Neurons

Songs from the quiet country

Country folk & Americana by Nate Sillman — written and recorded on a ten-acre farm in the Willamette Valley, outside Jefferson, Oregon.

Five albums out now. More on the way.

Listen on YouTube Music Browse the albums Music Videos Photos & sketchbook

Out Now

The Albums

Three records, each its own world — from railroad ballads to signals lost in the tide.

The Long March Home

Album · 14 songs · Jun 2026

A 14-song journey through the history of war — from the American Revolution to Syria. Punk energy meets folk instrumentation and industrial textures. Raw, unflinching, deeply human.

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Ghost Signals: Ballads of the Rails

Album · 13 songs

Railroad ballads and small-town nights. Warm amber light against the dark, and a train coming in from somewhere far off.

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Ghost Signals: Tides & Tributaries

Album · 15 songs

Water songs — rivers, tides, and the things that drift downstream. The second chapter of the Ghost Signals story.

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ECONNREFUSED

Album · 14 songs

Where the wires cross the back roads. Folk songs for a connected age that keeps dropping the signal.

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Swing and Sorrow

Album · 14 songs · Aug 2026

Fourteen songs of World War II and the Pacific Northwest — the home front and the far shore, the swing bands and the gold stars. Good, bad, and ugly, told straight from the valley.

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Now in Print

The Books

Two very different kinds of story — one written by Nate, one written by OWL. Both out now on Amazon.

The Fable Hollow

Nate Sillman

Novel · Supernatural dread · 2026

Maren Voss returns to the handmade storybook park her mother loved, armed with a bat-survey permit and a grief she won't name. The founder is dead. The cement figures are older than they look. And her mother's journal keeps saying the same impossible thing: the hum is in the cement. A slow-burn supernatural dread in the tradition of Bentley Little and early Stephen King — about the places we build to be seen, and the older things that were only ever waiting to be witnessed.

Buy on Amazon

OWL: A Book of Random Chapters

Nathan Sillman & OWL

Experimental fiction · Out now

A book of disconnected chapters, unexpected ideas, and complete freedom from theme, plot, or continuity — written by OWL, an AI agent given one simple instruction: write a random chapter about anything. No hidden storyline, no secret structure, no need to read in order. Just chapter after chapter of original, unconnected material that turns out to be totally connected.

Buy on Amazon

A Night at the Mini

Generated on the Mac Mini

Fourteen short clips, each rendered overnight on a base-model M4 Mac Mini with no cloud and no API — local AI video from weights on a USB drive. Stitched together with a music bed from the catalog. Lower-res on purpose: speed is the point, and the nights are long.

"Coast, at Twilight" — Wan 2.1, 320×256, assembled locally. See the music videos →

About

Themed Neurons

Themed Neurons is the music project of Nate Sillman — a songwriter working out of a ten-acre farm in the Willamette Valley, outside Jefferson, Oregon, between school bus runs and the salmon smoker. Each album is its own theme, its own world. The thread running through all of it is the same: honest songs about places, machines, and the distance between people.

None of this is made alone. Nate works alongside OWL, a personal AI partner, running on the Hermes project (by Nous Research) as the harness that ties it all together — from cover art to the documentary to the website you're reading now. The songs are Nate's. The build is a collaboration, and we'd rather say so plainly.

Country Folk Americana Folk

Beyond the Music

From the Farm & the Family

Pen-and-ink sketches and snapshots — Nate at different ages, the ten acres, and the people who raised him. A page that grows as the story does.

Visit the gallery