Music
Artist's Statement
My approach to music, and to most of my creative work actually, is to create the raw material quickly, through improvisation, to virtually disappear; my ego and sense of self dissolved in the music. Later. the ego, the sense of self returns, and I pretty obsessively re-work and cut and clean and edit and polish that raw material until I am satisfied. In the case of the Annunciation, I recorded a string of 'turn on the recorder, turn off the brain, sit down and play' pieces. None were rehearsed or thought out; They were all very raw. I didn't cut these pieces. The only things I did were post-production processes like EQing, adding a unique acoustic space for each track, and for some, doing more extensive digital manipulation. The recording took about 4 months of intermittant, rather desultory commitment. However, the post-production process took over a year, including a complete tear down and start over after 6 months. This live raw improvisation with its concomitant aspects of random, chance events, and openness to the Divine, coupled with the disciplined 'post-structuring' of the music, which can involve cutting, merging, overdubbing, and/or extensive signal processing, is really the product of the equal usage of both hemispheres of the brain. And I always take care to revere the silences between the notes. One must always listen: to one's bandmates, to one's inner pulse, to the earth, to one's muses, to the Divine. Listening is the most active act of composing and performing music. All of this is what makes my music what it is: Sparse sonically, dense and sometimes almost abstruse in form, lush and sensual, and often hallucinogenic. The extremely 'visual' quality of my music, along with its paradoxical sparse-lushness lends it perfectly to film scores. I never knew until I played with Jennifer Lowman, that much of what I do as a musician is a sort of physical analog of what a synthesist does in their 'virtual' world. We both make waveforms, and we both do extensive alterations of sound by playing with the envelopes, working in the time domain and filtering frequencies to alter timbre. But whereas a synthesist creates the root waveforms, the raw material, out of number generators and oscillators, I create them with strings, reeds, my voice, drums and bells and gongs. But my effects, and my playing techniques both alter the sound from there, often so completely that people are shocked to see that what they thought was synths on the CD is merely a guitar, sometimes played unconventionally, put through an effect or two. My playful obsession with signal processing and creative knob twiddling along with a very timbral, textural mindset results in work that is very applicable to sound design as well. |
"Love, Lust, and Genocide" Solo Work With Loons in the Monastery \With Clear Light Ensemble With Things Fall Apart (coming soon) |