Quiet Times.
It’s been a minute since the last missive here; truth be told, other than a few exceptions (detailed below) I’ve been taking one of my every-third-year breaks from writing & creating music (perfect timing for the world to, essentially, collapse during its scheduled appearance.) Productivity aside, this has been a fruitful period in catching up on what everyone else has been doing (which, during my normal fever-pitch schedule, has always been nigh-on impossible) and I’ve been working on myself, trying to sort all of that out, which is a bigger project than I’d anticipated.
That all said, a few things came & went during this stretch that I’m proud of; first, and the reason for this post, is that I was invited by the GRM’s François Bonnet to be the guest on his weekly Radio France program l’Expérimentale, which is now archived here (click through the image):
François is an absolute saint and has done far more in perservering & cutting through my often frustrating personal & mental stigmas than anyone on the planet, and I will (almost) always jump at the chance to help him out. This was a challenge to produce an hour-long program of “100% American” music, and I dug deep into several research-works-in-progress (including the Creelpolation 2) to make an hour of Post-Punk Electronics & general left-of-center, on-the-outside-looking-in selections that I guess is exactly what people expect from me. Very happy with how this all turned out, even my dry recitatif (thankfully gainfully spoken over in the native tongue).
In other music-related news, last month I finalized & submitted a brand-new piece, “Malört” for the Semibreve Festival in Braga, Portugal, which is now live in a monastery/gallery space there. For a minute it streamed on YouTube™, but is now only available to experience in-situ; if you’re in the North of Portugal, or passing through there, I encourage you to give it a few minutes of your life (info & a great framing of the piece by Pedro Rocha linked via the image below):
This is a brutally morose piece, largely composed at the Elektronmusikstudion & GRM in 2017 & 2018, and finalized here at Road House in June & July. It consists of 8 separate “cells” of Alinear Electronic Sound, with each element inhabiting its own space/speaker, with a huge, reciprocal side-chained array essentially self-policing how the elements come & go. It’s a lot; it’s a big one, and will most certainly put you in a bad mood, so I recommend grabbing a coffee nearby in the town square before heading over.
Finally, earlier this year I completed a new 16-channel piece for a new sound-focused experiential gallery space here in Brooklyn, and will of course echo the dynamics of this in gory detail once it is possible again for them to open their doors. This was the piece I’d mentioned here & there that was composed & captured in a huge SILO in Fribourg, Switzerland a few years back, and was originally slated to be an album-length return to the “Playthroughs” form before the (generous) commission came up & I decided to go that route in lieu of playing the commercial release game again. The piece is slated to be the centerpiece of the museum’s opening gambit, and I await the day in which I can tell you to go there & hear it with bated breath.
