I just released a new six-song EP!
“nevernaut” is a live electronics solo set I did performed at Carl Testa’s “Uncertainty Music Series” a while ago.
A central element of the album is processed voice – I think it’s really interesting to combine the intimate immediacy of the voice with the wild, otherworldly possibilities of electronic processing.
The album also features accordion and the sounds of healthy snacking.
It’s a little meditative and a little weird.
You can get it at:
Ok, I am super excited to share this!
I have a new composition on an album distributed at the 2016 Darmstadt Institute! The Distractfold Ensemble released the album, “historage: Remixes/Reworkings/Responses,” in an extremely limited edition CD to participants in the historic Darmstadt International Summer Course for New Music.
(But YOU don’t have to attend Darmstadt to hear the composition – you can save yourself some travel expenses and check it out on my Soundcloud!)
Since the 1950’s, the Darmstadt Summer Course has been a meeting place for musical heavy-hitters, including John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Olivier Messaien. I was selected to compose a piece in response to a selection from their archives: Marta Gentilucci’s “Radix Ipsius.”
It was an incredibly fun exercise, and it made Radix Ipsius one of my new favorite pieces! I’ll detail my process later, but, long story short, I knew I wanted to take the “spirit” of the woodblock that opens Gentilucci’s piece and apply it to a piano chord. So, I made a grid that analyzed each of Radix Ipsius’ sections by tone length, texture, pitch variation, density, sound source, and order. I then shifted each row of characteristics to the right or left, at first manipulating them to fulfill my desire to let the woodblock become sustained chords, and then letting the rest of the characteristics follow the pattern that created the woodblock adjustments. If that doesn’t make sense, don’t worry, I’ll explain more later!
(Amusingly, my VCFA brother-from-another-mother Aaron Butler was also selected for the CD).
Big thanks to the Distractfold Ensemble for putting this all together and including me!
My next blog post will go into the nitty-gritty details of how a “serial parameter shift” works and how I used it to make this piece.
I had a great weekend performing at the North Country Electronic Music Festival in Montpelier, VT. The event was organized by Dennis Bathory-Kitsz, Anne Decker, and David Morneau, and was part of of the 24th annual South End ArtHop – so it was a very cool scene with people coming in and out of the club all day if they were intrigued by the sounds emanating from within.
I performed the new second movement of “Piano” with my collaborator (and fellow VCFA alum) Aaron Cecchini-Butler.
Our collaborations are usually constrained by distance and time, but this time it was REALLY constrained – to the point that we weren’t able to rehearse until the morning of the performance. We had each written our parts individually without hearing the other’s contribution and, magically, they fit together almost immediately. We made some minor tweaking (and a beat…and a sub-bass, because every beat needs a sub-bass…) but we were ready to go pretty quickly.
(few people know that my love of improv extends to performance furniture…)
We were interviewed by Kalvos and Damian (Dennis Bathory-Kitsz and David Ross Gunn, who, might I add, has excellent taste in pants hues).
And we were hosted by Craig Pallet, a great composer who had also performed at the festival and who alsoincidentally takes amazing selfies:
Aaron and I debuted our new project, “Osaka Color Theory.” Watch this space!
Recently, my composerly colleague Dennis Báthory-Kitsz linked to an article in which composer Eric Chasalow argues too many electroacoustic composers are missing the importance of pitch in their compositions. (“Pitch” meaning frequencies that we hear as notes.)
I can’t claim to be up on the latest trends in electroacoustic music, but I thought that this was an interesting argument to make, given the prominence of a recent movement to use electronics to identify the pitches inherent in sounds: spectralism is, broadly, the compositional practice of identifying the pitches/overtones/partials in various sounds and using them to inform the selection of notes for a composition. The classic example is Gérard Grisey’s “Partiels,” in which the orchestra “plays” the notes indicated in a sonogram analysis of a trombone’s low E. The ensemble plays not just the low E, but all the other frequencies that the sonogram indicates are present when the trombone plays that one note.
I’ve had the opportunity to begin exploring the notes hidden in non-musical sounds by starting in the same place as a spectral piece: taking recordings of not-instruments, figuring out the pitches those not-instruments make, and using those pitches to to inform the notes that acoustic instruments play.
I was able to begin this experiment via a Disquiet Junto assignment to make a piece using a recording of a refrigerator. I figured out the pitches of my refrigerator’s thunks, rumbles and whirrs by ear:
After that, I wrote a melody for the accordion to go above the “notes” the refrigerator was “playing,” with the end result sounding something like:
For a different, very exciting project (that I will post more about soon!), I took a recording of a woodblock, and used Ableton’s Spectrum to figure out frequencies were in the woodblock’s sound, and then used those notes as the basis of a piano part. The musical intervals between those frequencies (a triad of an augmented fourth and a half-step) became the seed for the whole piano part.
If you’re curious about doing this yourself, there are a number of ways to figure out the pitches of sounds that most people don’t think of as having pitches. Here’s the ones I have used:
A fun project would be to map 88 samples to a MIDI keyboard and link each sample to its closest pitch on the keyboard…
I updated my scores page with a lot of the graphic and prose scores I’ve done over the past several years. Check it out!
My traditionally scored music will be up in the summer – check back then!
The Disquiet Junto has been providing me with a much-needed creative outlet this school year (I have taken on extra duties in addition to my regular job and am swamped!) I was very happy with this week’s project, which was to take very short snippets of a non-rhythmic sound and turn them into rhythms for a piece.
In working with these short samples, the shifts in timbre and overtones began to grab my attention more than the rhythmic loops. When taking long recordings and turning them into short loops, the background “noise” of the recording becomes very much an important characteristic of the loop. When working with very short audio samples, background noise becomes more like a pitch.
My VCFA mentor Diane Moser once presented on R. Murray Schafer’s concept of “Soundscapes” and and how background noise is only background noise if we define it contrast to what we are paying attention to and expect to hear. (Obviously Cage’s piece 4′ 33″ draws on this principal also.)
Anyway, enough philosophizing – let’s play weird music!
And if you like this sort of thing, you may also enjoy my playlist of all my Disquiet tracks.
I just posted a piano + electronics that I wrote and performed with Aaron Butler at the Vermont College of Fine Arts Electronics Showcase, August 2015.
We wanted to write a piece that used lots of electronics (to make it suitable for the “Electronics Showcase” night, of course), and drew on several strains of contemporary music: contemporary classical, contemporary jazz, and contemporary beats.
We started with some piano chords Aaron had been working with, and made everything else in the piece evolve from that initial material. The fuzzy synth tones re-imagine the piano’s motive, sometimes via new voicings, sometimes by playing the original chord tones aleatorically to make unpredictable combinations.
The piano was recorded live at the performance. However, the electronics were almost inaudible on the live recording. To get a good mix, I brought the live piano recording into the Ableton set I performed from and “re-performed” the piece to get all the computer-generated material right from the source. That left me with a muddy piano recording and flawless synth-and-beat accompaniment. So I tried to make the roomy piano sound an asset, running it through a vinyl-record emulator and a phaser. To quote Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, “Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify.”
[Murakami] likened the solitary act of writing to cooking one of his favourite foods, deep-fried oysters.
His wife can’t stand the dish, so he has no choice but to cook and eat them alone, he told the audience, according to the Asahi Shimbun.
“I am lonely, but they are delicious,” he added. “Like the relationship between solitude and freedom, it moves in an endless cycle. Picking out single words that are contained within me is also a solitary act so [writing novels] is similar to eating fried oysters by myself.”
– http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/02/librarians-in-uproar-after-borrowing-record-of-haruki-murakami-is-leaked
Part of a very cool collaboration with CIVIC-TV. CIVIC requested tracks from 22 musicians, asking for a mixture of noise, ambient, and beats. He then made a visual mixtape linking all the tracks together using highly saturated footage that is simultaneously very abstract and very 80’s.
You can watch the whole video here:
My thing starts at about 28 minutes.
If you want the audio!
If you want a VHS tape!
If you want the YouTube!
At long last, I am a member of the 1%! I contributed 3 minutes of music (and 12 minutes of silence) among 13 other artists to this awesome experimental project, Simultaneous Aural Detriments.
The organizer of this piece asked 14 artists to contribute “a track of exactly 15 minutes with no more than 3 minutes of actual sound, distributed in any way throughout the total length of the track. This left each track with a total of 12 minutes of silence.”
The organizer of the compilation then layered all the tracks together, letting the structure emerge as it may. There’s a lot of hisses and bleeps and boops; I contributed some piano lines under my ROBOT MONSTOR moniker.
I think it’s a good listen – the structure emerges through the happenstance of repeated sound and repeated links between sounds.
nate trier