Sixty Years, Gregory Taylor!
Holey Smokes! I had no idea! Gregory is always great about remembering/gifting those of us lucky to be his friends, so I felt I had to do something to mark his "I'm getting a little bit freaked out about it" day.
g60 is the result of my frantic casting about for that something to do. The piece is exactly six minutes long (ha ha -- get it? six times ten? Six of sixty seconds? You go, Gregory!). I also used my silly methodology wherein the sounds all have tangible meaning. But that meaning would remain privately local to me unless I explain it: The insects heard throughout most of the piece (we call them "wheezhu" bugs in our family) represent my childhood, because I suspect that Gregory and I would have been 'best friends' had we known each other back in elementary school. Gregory grew up in northern Kentucky, not all that far from my southern Indiana home. Although I've known him for almost thirty adult years now, with our shared midwestern background I feel like we were boyhood buddies. Almost all of the synthetic sounds come from samples I extracted from our PGT catalog. They're also sounds I especially associate with Gregory. The electronic drum beats just past the midpoint of the piece are a case in point -- Terry and I often referred to Gregory as the "drummer" in the band. After I added a few drum-samples to my own performance patch that artificial label became even more artificial. For the pitches used to process the wheezhu bugs, I constructed a rough approximation of the slendro and pelog gamelan scales. Gregory often employs non-western tunings in his work, gamelan tunings in particular. He is an accomplished gamelan performer in addition to his fun digital output.
There is more, but that's a sense of the general idea behind this piece. And of course, the hope that it appropriately says: