Self released on January 1st, a pretty uneducated and foolish choice? Everyone is away with their family or friends, partying or recuperating & what have you. Subconsciously it might also be what I sought at the time, to fly under the radar. All the material for this album was created in 2010 and then I felt an urgency to create and unleash things, self released 3 albums in less than 2 months… Let’s call it a catharsis.
Anyhow, the album title, and to a greater extent the music itself, represent my reflections at the time. It deals mainly with the concept of interdependence, namely how things we logically view as separate entities can come alive and shatter or re-arrange perceptions once allowed to interact. It takes on the stance that there seems to be only transient forms & structures mingling with each other, generating new forms & structures in the process, a sort of perpetual procreation if you will. Thus the perception that something, anything at all really, exists as a sole & solitary entity would be erroneous. (Albeit practical for day to day operations, such as naming a chair a chair…)
I make no great claim as to the cause of it all, this is merely contemplative fascination expressed the best way I know how. Now how are those things reflected in the music? Good question Jim. I make such extensive use of convolution processes on this album, the only exception is one (almost blasphemous, I might add) string loop in the background on the 3rd and 5th tracks.
For those in the not know, convolutions were designed to be reverbs initially, where you can take one source sound, let’s say a piano piece, and apply the acoustics of an environment to it, let’s say a concert hall. Instead of mathematically generating a delay that gives the illusion of reverb, which is what digital reverbs do (grosso modo). The real magnificence of this process becomes evident when you use it for other purposes though, mingling sounds together, as they become intertwined in ways where you lose any sense of what both might have been previously. It’s akin to genetic lineage in a sense, the newborn sound retains properties from both parent sounds, yet isn’t exactly like neither. A thing of beauty if you ask me, and the impromptu results are often times absolutely fascinating.
A few words on the pieces:
• On Edge: Convolution of an organ & mellotron piece with a distorted amplifier, this is no quiet ordeal, makes me feel like flying on a proton beam propulsion thingie through an asteroid field.
• To & From: Convolution of field recordings, delayed steps and a village church band/orchestra in Viet Nam. I have no clue how it came to have such industrial open space like quality in the sound, and the clunky noises in the background either, very stationary and cyclic. It’s not meant to be super interesting or involving, I like to think it counterbalances the harshness of the opener, and rests the mind before things to come.
• Phone’s Ringin’ Dude… : Clearly, you’re not achievers… A convolution of a santoor, with, wait for it… santoor! The fast and reverberant repetition of the pluckings make it sound like strings & bells at times, but santoor is all there is in there for the first ten minutes. Then comes in a string section loop from an orchestral work at 10 minutes in until the end of the piece (also goes on into “…Thank you Donnie”)
“Phone’s Ringin’ Dude” & “Thank you Donnie” were originally intended as a single piece, the reason I intersected them with an interlude (a bonus piece you can get by purchasing the album, that’s right!) is that at the time of release, I didn’t have enough bandcamp street cred to upload music upwards of 20ish minutes. If you play them successively you’ll notice there isn’t much of a break.
This was an extremely long and tedious piece to put together, the original source material came from a library tape that I have played time and time and time again over the years. So the quality of the material wasn’t exactly A1, that has its own charms, granted, but I also didn’t want the piece to ‘suffer’ from it, a fine line to thread I guess. To top it, the convolution of similar material tends to sometimes bring up incredibly high peaks in otherwise fairly even wavefield, exacerbate certain frequencies, I tried finding the right pitch without losing the quality of the instrument’s sound, etc. I really fought with this one, and it’s not like I feel like I won or anything, there just comes a point where you say “alright, this is it, no more fiddling” and let the work speak for itself, with its own quirks and shortcomings. We all have them anyway.
It’s obviously fairly recursive, tonal work, intended for meditative like purposes. However I wanted to break from the usual drone & occasional bells with nature sounds (otherwise known as crap) and make it a vibrant, exclamatory type of piece.
And there you have it, that’s how this baby was born, I spared you the gruesome and graphic details.
Anyhow, the album title, and to a greater extent the music itself, represent my reflections at the time. It deals mainly with the concept of interdependence, namely how things we logically view as separate entities can come alive and shatter or re-arrange perceptions once allowed to interact. It takes on the stance that there seems to be only transient forms & structures mingling with each other, generating new forms & structures in the process, a sort of perpetual procreation if you will. Thus the perception that something, anything at all really, exists as a sole & solitary entity would be erroneous. (Albeit practical for day to day operations, such as naming a chair a chair…)
I make no great claim as to the cause of it all, this is merely contemplative fascination expressed the best way I know how. Now how are those things reflected in the music? Good question Jim. I make such extensive use of convolution processes on this album, the only exception is one (almost blasphemous, I might add) string loop in the background on the 3rd and 5th tracks.
For those in the not know, convolutions were designed to be reverbs initially, where you can take one source sound, let’s say a piano piece, and apply the acoustics of an environment to it, let’s say a concert hall. Instead of mathematically generating a delay that gives the illusion of reverb, which is what digital reverbs do (grosso modo). The real magnificence of this process becomes evident when you use it for other purposes though, mingling sounds together, as they become intertwined in ways where you lose any sense of what both might have been previously. It’s akin to genetic lineage in a sense, the newborn sound retains properties from both parent sounds, yet isn’t exactly like neither. A thing of beauty if you ask me, and the impromptu results are often times absolutely fascinating.
A few words on the pieces:
• On Edge: Convolution of an organ & mellotron piece with a distorted amplifier, this is no quiet ordeal, makes me feel like flying on a proton beam propulsion thingie through an asteroid field.
• To & From: Convolution of field recordings, delayed steps and a village church band/orchestra in Viet Nam. I have no clue how it came to have such industrial open space like quality in the sound, and the clunky noises in the background either, very stationary and cyclic. It’s not meant to be super interesting or involving, I like to think it counterbalances the harshness of the opener, and rests the mind before things to come.
• Phone’s Ringin’ Dude… : Clearly, you’re not achievers… A convolution of a santoor, with, wait for it… santoor! The fast and reverberant repetition of the pluckings make it sound like strings & bells at times, but santoor is all there is in there for the first ten minutes. Then comes in a string section loop from an orchestral work at 10 minutes in until the end of the piece (also goes on into “…Thank you Donnie”)
“Phone’s Ringin’ Dude” & “Thank you Donnie” were originally intended as a single piece, the reason I intersected them with an interlude (a bonus piece you can get by purchasing the album, that’s right!) is that at the time of release, I didn’t have enough bandcamp street cred to upload music upwards of 20ish minutes. If you play them successively you’ll notice there isn’t much of a break.
This was an extremely long and tedious piece to put together, the original source material came from a library tape that I have played time and time and time again over the years. So the quality of the material wasn’t exactly A1, that has its own charms, granted, but I also didn’t want the piece to ‘suffer’ from it, a fine line to thread I guess. To top it, the convolution of similar material tends to sometimes bring up incredibly high peaks in otherwise fairly even wavefield, exacerbate certain frequencies, I tried finding the right pitch without losing the quality of the instrument’s sound, etc. I really fought with this one, and it’s not like I feel like I won or anything, there just comes a point where you say “alright, this is it, no more fiddling” and let the work speak for itself, with its own quirks and shortcomings. We all have them anyway.
It’s obviously fairly recursive, tonal work, intended for meditative like purposes. However I wanted to break from the usual drone & occasional bells with nature sounds (otherwise known as crap) and make it a vibrant, exclamatory type of piece.
And there you have it, that’s how this baby was born, I spared you the gruesome and graphic details.
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