Browse Items (868 total)

• LOAM

• minim

• and drift

• Effusion

  micro-collage, polystylism, rock, electronica; 2 channel recording
  
  In “Pleasure Beats: Rhythm and the Aesthetics of Current Electronic Music”, Ben Neill describes how popular and art music are distinguished along rhythmic lines. He predicts a future music where such distinctions are less clear; where the rhythmic vernacular of pop music is spoken in artistic territory. Much of my recent creative compositional efforts, including this piece, exemplify movement in this direction, both in terms of rhythm as well as other musical elements. Here, a foundation is set with materials from the pop world: verse-chorus form, 4/4 time signatures, fuzzy synth basses, rock grooves and EDM breaks. These materials are then manipulated in electroacoustic-art-music ways: timbres are transformed, grains are made and re-ordered, meters are changed, and earlier materials are restated in discontinuous sequences. The result is less a fusion and more a congeries where non-ironic choruses and dizzying jump-cuts cohabitate. These combinations are not motivated by a desire to influence the language of art music for its own sake, rather, they are expressions of cultural heterogeneity that is not compartmentalized.

• adagio for piano and soundplane

• mesospherics

  red sprites, blue jets, noctilucent clouds, whistling air, diffuse, faraway haze
  
  In the mesosphere – too high for aircraft and too low for spacecraft – fleeting electrical phenomena like red sprites, blue jets and noctilucent clouds consistently elude careful study. Higher still, in the thermosphere, are gas molecules that vibrate furiously in isolation, superheated by the sun but so thinly spaced that they cannot collide with one another to properly constitute a gas. Mesospherics musically inhabits these strange, poorly understood places. The piece uses ambisonic spatialization techniques to situate a wide variety of sounds, both processed and synthetic, in a very large three-dimensional virtual space. Some of these have clear images attached, such as the whistling air sounds of the opening, while others have less concrete associations. Some are fixed in place, articulate and very close, while others resemble a diffuse, faraway haze, and still others fly rapidly and brilliantly through space. But all of these sounds are highly fragmented and elusive, much like the fascinating and bizarre phenomena we observe in the earth’s upper atmosphere.

• Rotational Asymmetries

  Electronic work for two vintage instruments. Slowly evolving. Warm. Buzzy. Minimal.
  
  This piece involves the first use of my recently acquired vintage model 31H Leslie speaker. I played my Hammond M3 through it and recorded various elements that were used in the construction of the finished piece using my fragment-based compositional process. I also generated some repeating and evolving short patterns using a Dot Com Q960 sequencer driving my Moog Model 12 modular synthesizer.

• Murmurations of the Krell

  Experimental hardware-based live performance electronic drone piece.
  
  I’ve always been very interested in the idea of limitations when it comes to creating music. Whenever I start work on a new piece, I begin by establishing meaningful limitations to work within. I find this to be very freeing. (Stravinsky was right when talked about the freedom of limits.) Last Summer I did a live electronic music performance that involved a large amount of equipment in an elaborate setup. At some point shortly after that performance while discussing it with a friend, I mentioned, (kind of half jokingly) that I could do an effective live performance with a Quad Oscillator and a wah wah pedal. Though I had meant it as a joke, the more I thought about the idea of working within that kind of extreme limitation, the more attracted I was to the idea. So, I set about creating this piece.
  
  Murmurations of the Krell is improvisational, though it is following a general plan and has been rehearsed. I would call this an experimental electronic drone piece. The only sound source being used is a Quad Oscillator that was built by Tim Kaiser. It has only a single output that I am splitting multiple times and running through a couple of loopers and various hardware signal processors, (including a wah wah pedal). The piece is notable for what it does not use. There is no computer, no sequencer, no keyboard or other conventional musical instrument interface. Just knobs, switches, faders and pedals. I found this to be a challenging set of limitations, but at the same time, stimulating.
  
  The title of the work is a direct reference to the classic 1956 sci-fi film, “Forbidden Planet”. In this film, the Krell were an ancient, long-extinct race of beings with highly advanced technology – a technology which eventually lead to their own demise. The electronic score for the film was created by Bebe and Louis Barron, and I feel that some of the general aesthetic character of my piece is evocative of their work.

• Chamber of Mechanisms

  Experimental electronic drone piece created from material generated on an ARP 2500 modular synthesizer.
  
  Chamber of Mechanisms is a fragment-based electronic music piece, which uses audio generated on a vintage ARP 2500. This is a very rare analog modular synthesizer. They didn’t make very many of them and only a very small number still exist. The particular instrument I’m using for this project is installed in the electronic music lab at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. The instrument was there back in the early ’80s when I was a composition student at the U. of M., but it was completely out of commission. I’m so glad it didn’t wind up on the scrap heap, as has happened to so many of these exotic old instruments. It is now functioning and usable, and I was very excited to be able spend some quality time with this beauty. Many thanks to Michael Duffy who heads up the electronic music lab at the U. of M. for allowing me access to it. I spent an afternoon working with the instrument and recording a bunch of material that I then took back to my studio. There I transferred the audio into my computer and began work on constructing the finished piece. It sounds somewhat different than anything else I’ve ever done. This is no doubt due to the fact that the instrument itself has its own very particular sonic characteristics.

• North Loop

  Live/studio hybrid composition using hardware-based electronic instruments.
  
  I completed work on this project in the Winter of 2016. It’s a fragment piece, which uses as it’s source material a recording of the live electronic music performance I did at my Six Projects record release party, and also some recordings of the rehearsals for that performance. I deliberately chose to NOT use a computer in this live performance, which was something new for me. I’m calling the piece “North Loop” for several reasons: 1.) The live performance took place in a part of downtown Minneapolis called the North Loop, 2.) though the piece is not particularly loop-intensive, it does make use of some loops, and 3.) I live and work in Minneapolis – a Northern city.
  
  The attached video is of the live performance. The music you’re hearing is the actual finished piece, which was created later in a computer, using audio from the performance and from rehearsals for that performance. There are multiple layers of audio, which have been highly edited and mixed to create the finished product. I edited the video to more or less line things up to match as best I could, but it’s really just an approximation. There was a lot of improvisation involved in the performance, and the finished music actually has more simultaneous layers than I would have been able to pull off live as a solo performance. Still, it’s nice to see the video with the music and I also like that we have some documentation of Paul Christian’s visual projection work. He was using the Processing software environment to create the imagery. I was feeding him about eight separate audio lines that he was working with live.