On Black Friday, 2021 I released a solo album of 20 tracks, all recorded as a response to the despair of isolation and the horrors of… space. Yes, they were also recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic, and although the “despair of isolation and the horrors of” the global disease were (and are) a daily realty, working on this album was a way to escape.
The music was inspired by Mothership, a sci-fi horror tabletop role playing game, from which I borrowed the title. More accurately, it was inspired by group of friends with whom I played Mothership (the game) via video chat. I started with one dark ambient piece to get us in the mood for the game, which led to another, and another until the album was complete. Mothership (the album) is available by the good graces of Æther Sound. Read on for the liner notes: Continue reading →
Parochial Dissonance (Æther Sound, Dec. 4, 2020) – The title of this release describes the tragedy, loss, and suffering experienced when we narrow the scope of our worldviews. The album is a series of solo pieces captured from three streaming performances during the COVID-19 pandemic, and two live performances just before. Each piece was improvised within sets of rules applied to process, time, texture, and tonality. The pieces were performed on various synthesizers and Rhodes electric piano with occasional use of looping, arpeggiation, and signal processing. Continue reading for a look at the liner notes. Continue reading →
I’ve made so much music over the years and most of it is sitting on hard drives or gathering dust in neglected corners of the internet. Recently a listener reminded me of an album I made over 6 years ago hidden in one such dusty corner, so I moved it to another dusty corner. The album of electronic music was composed using a dogmatic approach that you can read more about in the liner notes. Bring a duster!
Strands is the working title for a series of audiovisual compositions based on the idea of animated, generative, graphic scores. Last year I composed six of these scores written in Javascript for Parking Ramp Project, a performance installation in a seven-level parking ramp with a large cast reflecting on transience, migration, and stability commissioned by Guggenheim fellow, Pramila Vasudevan. While Parking Ramp Project was composed for a trio, Strands is specifically composed for a soloist.
Rain is a new movement in the series and the first that I have produced with video of the animated score. Currently there are five movements in the piece. I performed the first four recently at the ISSTA conference in Cork, Ireland. The visual part of the piece is meant to be read like music but without the use of key or time signatures. Each time the piece is played the visuals are regenerated, so it is never performed the same way twice.
The musician may interpret the visuals in many ways. For example, in Rain lines are animated from the top of the screen to the bottom. Where the line appears horizontally is roughly regarded as pitch and as the line animates the sound is modulated. The lines also vary in weight. Heavier lines are louder and lower in pitch while thinner lines are quieter, generally higher, and sometimes altered with a high-pass filter.
I performed Rain using the Novation Bass Station II, which has a feature (AFX mode overlays) that allows for each note to have entirely different parameters. With this technique I was able to map different timbres to the keybed and use this variety in texture as another way to interpret the score. Keep an eye out for more of these. It is my intent to make videos for all five of the movements and perhaps add one or two more to the series.
Aniccha Arts premieres a performance installation inside a seven-level parking garage. The project asks questions about transience, migration, and stability in a space that temporarily stores cars and is home to nothing. Performers pervade the parking structure with their bodies, working against the visible slant of the ramp to find their individual verticality. Questions we asked in creating the work: How do we find softness in a landscape of concrete? What anchors us on these alternating planes? How do we connect across such a complex landscape? video by: Cully Gallagher
This video by Cully Gallagher is 3 minutes and 30 seconds of fragments from the approximately 44 minute long Parking Ramp Project. Composing music for this performance installation showed me how far it is still possible to explore improvised music through experimental processes. Considering the acoustics of the parking ramp was a critical consideration within the musical scope. One approach to this was rests coded into the algorithms that allowed for the music to decay during long pauses while the ambient sound of the space inserted itself as an unintentional “performer”.
I am humbled by the willingness of the Pramila Vasudevan and other collaborators to humor my absurd scheme to compose the work using Javascript. This language allowed me to quickly produce animated, generative, graphic scores. It was also a privilege to perform the music with Peter Hennig (drums) and Cody McKinney (bass/electronics) who effortlessly interpreted the graphic scores. You can read and hear more about the project or continue for a gallery of screen grabs from the animated graphic scores. Continue reading →
