Cthonic Hymal, 2014
This work is a lament. A lament for what, exactly, I am unsure. I
composed this work after discovering a set of short (< 3 minutes)
recordings of cello playing I had made some 3 years earlier and which
I had perhaps not listened to since. Each sample was of a different
length and explored a different possibility of timbre with
unconventional bowing techniques. I cannot recall if the player of
the cello is myself or someone else, although I would venture to
speculate that it is indeed myself, since I am capable of only
unorthodox cello playing since I am not, in any way, trained as a
cello player. I time-stretched the most interesting recordings so
that all of the resulting sound files would be of commensurate length.
I then arranged each time-stretched file on separate tracks in a
digital audio workstation and applied no other
post-production/compositional strategy other than slight adjustments
of gain and stereo field placement.
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de elementorum: laecrimatic solo, 2014
Although this work very much happened by a happy accident in that I
happened to be sitting outside enjoying a rainy afternoon when my
attention was caught by the sound of shifting rhythmic patterns caused
by fluctuations in the volume of rain falling from the roof of my
house onto a metal vessel my wife and I use to water our garden
plants. The piece was exhibited/auditioned at a group show of sound
art, And Then I Whirled to the Sound of, in Dallas, TX. I was
interviewed about the work in an article that appeared online at
artandseek.net.
http://artandseek.net/2014/07/22/make-some-noise-sound-art-at-oil-cotton/
Winter Metal + Sounds Occurring (2014)
The impetus for creating this work arose out of facets of my thinking
regarding loosely connected philosophical concerns, such as the
misconception that the human environment is somehow separate from
nature; how I might simultaneously create an improvised performance
and a field recording—meaning a desire to conflate them into a
single entity—and in doing so treat my immediate ambient environment
as both collaborator and performance conductor. I meditated upon how
these thoughts might manifest as a piece of music for some days before
deciding on using a single sound source, a cheap tam tam suspended
from a metal armature, that I would perform in order to respond to the
sounds of the environment in time. I recorded this piece in one take
while giving my utmost care to attempt to be guided by time and
amplitude—so as to subsume my identity and needs and allow the
environment to direct me rather than the other way around. As the
title suggests this work was recorded on a winter day, which I
remember as being sunny and bright, yet rather cold.
In The Cauldron of the Body
This work was composed in 2009, premiered in March of 2014 and
recorded in April of 2014 by vocalist and performer Lily Taylor. The
foundation of this work is a Taoist text describing a process of
spiritual alchemy by uniting the Green Dragon and White Tiger energies
in order to form the Golden Elixir. I made a statistic analysis of
the text in order to discover how many times letters occurred
throughout, which I used for the basic time structure of the piece.
In other words, if the letter ‘T’ occurs 10 times in the text then
the sound associated with ‘T’ is repeated, or sustained, for 10
seconds each time it reappears in the work. I also created a loose
system of certain letters corresponding to orthodox dynamic
indications, such as pianissimo, fortissimo and so forth. The actual
score is notated in the International Phonetic Alphabet and allows for
a great degree of performer interpretation within its rather rigorous
structure.
Resonant Machine Music 2, 2015 and Pendulum (second performance),
2014
Both of these works belong to my ongoing series, Copulative Signules,
which explores the possibilities of designing semi-autonomous musical
systems in custom software. These systems use audio and data feedback
and recursive circuits of modulation as the primary compositional
strategy to produce real time, generative sonic environments. While
both Resonant Machine Music 2 and Pendulum share similar
compositional/systemic construction they explore very different
timbral terrains. Both systems, however, were recorded as they were
performed/performed themselves and were allowed to unfold with very
little intervention by me. It should be noted that the full title of
each piece is Copulative Signules: Digital Simitals: Resonant Machine
Music 2 and Copulative Signules: Pendulum (second performance).