fallpiece




hardware:   Apple MacBook (intel)/OSX, Gibson Epiphone "Les Paul" guitar (cherry red!)
software:   RTcmix, Apple Logic Pro

We had a few unusually warm nights in October. The warmth rekindled the sounds of September insects and the trilling of late summer frogs. On one of these nights I took my field-recording gear out to our new footbridge over our (hopefully!) flood-preventing swale in the back yard. The landscaping and work was done this summer by our neighbor Lawrence Mendies. I recorded a fair slice of time. I'm not a 'field-recording purist'; these soundfiles contain all kinds of extraneous noises -- airplanes passing overhead, cars driving by out in front, various other disturbances imposed on the natural back-yard environment.

To me, however, these external sounds are deeply imbedded in my sense of where we live. They form the sounds of my life here in Roosevelt. I also get almost comically literal about what various sounds can represent. I doubt anyone else knows of these symbolic attachments, but I use them to structure my music a lot.

With fallpiece, for example, I wanted to use the recordings to capture the waning of autumn, the combination of human-historical unease at the approach of winter combined with the anticipation of the wonderful holiday season (and ultimately the return of spring). Things radically changed, though, with the realization that my myeloma was returning. The literal-use example: towards the very end of the piece, the wind swells twice. At the peak of each swell, I randomly chopped the sound into little bits and rearranged them. This is my life being shuffled, again, at the end of fall, 2010.

There are many other of these transliteral musical thingies, in this and other pieces of mine. Silly, I know, but what the heck. I like it. Plus in this one I got to play my guitar again and mess around with some RTcmix filters.

Here's a link to the piece: