Output details

Crumbling Walls and Wandering Rocks

Crumbling Walls and Wandering Rocks was written as a study in the interpolation of sonically contrasting materials. Broadly speaking, these contrasts arise out of the different ways in which the instruments and electronics mix together. At certain moments, groups of performers play static collections of sounds which fuse together to create a listening experience of a singular, phenomenological nature. At other moments, the articulation of discrete gestures permit individual instrumental identities to emerge. What is of interest here is not the mere juxtaposition of these contrasting tropes, which is a somewhat well explored idiom in contemporary music. Rather, the aim is to find new ways to connect these materials through a series of subtle and gradual transformations, both as piecemeal alterations in acoustic figuration and also mediated through computer processing. By connecting otherwise contrasting experiences through gradual processes, the goal is to link opposing sonic tropes such that they are heard as occupying the same space, creating a listening experience where a germ for generating each formal section is uncovered in the previous, as if hidden within its predecessor.

Connecting these divergent categories of sound making was achieved through a methodical formal design which interpolates musical passages between the textural and the figurative. Such interpolations are designed to give more weight to the moments when new sonic details first emerge: the moment when a figure first begins to emerge from a texture, or the moment when overlapping utterances reach sufficient saturation so that the vestiges of the individual begin to lose primacy. Technology is used to enable and amplify such trajectories. The ability to layer many pre-recorded instrumental voices serves to explode the perceived sense of saturation and simultaneity, enabling individuals to become lost in a sea of sound.