Before work this morning, I was laying in bed listening to the ceiling fan and the morning birds singing and it got me thinking. How can you enjoy music without the element of the ambient sound serendipitously entering the aural fold? I mean, Ok, it’s a rhetorical question, but so often there’s been crazy extra-musical serendipity that comes out of the blending of “composed” music, and the music of a space or place — the sound of just whatever is going on. John Cage really got this, matter of fact, I think that a lot of composers and music fans get this, but they don’t bother to write about it, or think about it, or plan it’s inclusion into their compositions.

On the one hand, though, maybe something’s lost when we can’t hear pure music, or pure sound without outside noise coming in, but I’ve never been much of a purist. I think of Beethoven composing his 5th Piano Concerto and the canons and drums of Napoleon’s approaching army and how it influenced this work, or their’s the sound of humming telephone lines and how Harold Budd has talked about that influencing his work, and more importantly his listening. I think of R. Murray Schafer’s Soundscape: The tuning of the world where he talks about how the glazing of people’s windows increased gradually, and so did the volume of activities in the street.

I think we’re better listeners now, maybe more so than those who preceded us, and almost certainly more so than those folks that lived in a pre-Industrial Revolution world. We’re able to more carefully discern sound even within the presence of many other sounds. We can be walking down a busy street with car horns, many people having conversations, squeaking truck brakes, and a variety of other sonic ephemera and still be able to listen to, and hear, the sound of our favorite music on our iPods. There’s a a lot of sonic information, all coming at us at once, and as a listener and composer I find that pretty freakin’ cool!

As I mentioned here, I’ll be featured artist over at the Vague Terrain site to kick off a new series for them. I’ve been working diligently on pulling together all the pieces, and I’m particularly pleased that my friend and collaborator Michael Teager was able to join me on the saxophone for this composition. It’s a long form work, about thirty minutes in length, and most certainly broaches new sonic territory, while also remaining true to my sonic direction. In parts I feel like this recording really brings in Jan Garbarek, or Dave Liebman influence to my work with, at times, a bit of an homage to some of the more contemplative works of Sun Ra. In sum, I’m very pleased with the work, and when it’s live over at Vague Terrain I’ll post again here.

Came across this post on Disquiet.com, Marc Weidenbaum’s highly recommended Web site, and your truly left a comment there, underscoring one of Marc’s points. I’m posting this here, because Marc touches on something that’s very near and dear to my heart, and subsequently worth referencing here on the site – site specific sound, or the sound of a particular place and the impressions it leaves with you as a listener having the experience. For me, this is, absolutely, the critical intersection of ideas for me as a composer: I’m trying to capture an emotional impression, sonically… Marc’s post is a good read, and there’s a lot of great music downloads posted there, as well. Enjoy.

Vague Terrain, an online journal for Digital Art, Culture and Technology has selected my work to kick off the audio edition of their journal. I’ll be doing this by presenting a newly created, and not available elsewhere composition that will be available at the site. This is set to go live in September. I don’t have a lot of details yet, but I’m pleased with the compositional work I’ve done thus far, and I think fans of the work will appreciate this, as it definitely taps into the sort of impressionistic soundscape work I’ve been writing about here for the last couple months.

Gales of November has forked.

I’ve never really had a project do this before. I’ve had things evolve and change, even be abandoned, but something interesting has happened with this one.

As I’ve written here, here and here, I started working on a new ambient project in the vein of The Phantom Light and Huronic Minor.

That project sort of got side tracked when I started developing a narrative for that, which I wrote about here and here.

Well, I’ve sort of found myself pursuing both directions. I finished one level of production for about 85 minutes of music this weekend, which will need to be cut down. I’ve also been writing and recording a song structure on the same theme. I thought of taking a Radiohead approach and merging songs and ambience. I may still do that, but I don’ t hear the songs merging with the already recorded material, which means I’m looking at another 50 minutes, at least, so far, of music that doesn’t have a home. Will it be a two-disc set? Two sides of the same coin, kind of thing, or will it be two different recordings. I’m also kicking around the idea of assembling a band for the purpose of documenting these songs in a band format, but progress on that front has been slow.

In any case, I just wanted to give an update as to where things are.

As I’m continuing to develop the sound of Gales of November, or whatever it may be called, when all is said and done, the more I think about the instrumentation, arrangement, etc… The formula that I’m using right now has me cutting a voice and guitar track and then layering on top of that with synths, bass guitar and light percussion. It’s with this process in mind that I thought I’d post this interesting article called The Art of Combining Instruments and Sounds. The article touches on areas that fairly rudimentary to the composer or producer, but it was nice to see these laid out in such neat and consolidated way.

Here are a few of the best excerpts:

Consider the musicians and instruments you have available, and start there. The combination might be original from the start, and hopefully sounds good too.

Find two instruments that blend well in a unique way, and see what else you can add to the mix to enhance the sound.

Find a unique sound combination for the rhythmic infrastructure, and build on top of it.

Experiment with using native instruments such as the didgeridoo, sitar, sticks, steel drums and hand drums.

The narrative and the structure of Gales of November continues to change. Whereas, I wrote that the narrative for Gales of November was being developed, a change in the narrative and the musical direction started to occur.

As an artist you’re a bit of an explorer, but instead of going out into the world, you go into yourself, and see what you can dredge up, see what you can find, get to know your deepest self and what inspires you. This has very much been the case with Gales of November. Even with nearly 80 minutes of music recorded, as I started to flesh out the written narrative I couldn’t help but see it, somewhat, taking shape as a song, or a series of songs, like a song cycle. The music and the words, together, with a variety of complimentary timbres and textures started doing a better job of completing the overall impression or living picture of the sound.

This is the crux for any artist. You do one thing and folks get interested in that, and when you depart from that fans of the work have to decide to grow with you or leave you behind. Inevitably, that’s the fortunate/unfortunate path of any artist who’s truly working with their being and their soul, but whereas I thought this might make a great recording for a Hypnos, or Infraction Recordings, that ship will have most certainly sailed with this new musical direction. Instead, something more like Radiohead mixed with the folky textures of Gordon Lightfoot or Dylan is being born.

In many ways, it’s truly the extension of what was born on Olagra, and no matter how much I’ve fought it or been unsure of that direction, over the last few years, this is the direction the work is taking. Thanks for taking the trip with me.

I continue to work on Gales of November, and I find myself continually thinking about wanting to do more to guide the narrative. I recently read Robert Goolrick’s A Reliable Wife, which is mostly set in turn-of-the-century midwest United States, specifically, Chicago, St.Louis and mostly Wisconsin. I cruised the 300 pages in just ten hours as I was swept away by the story and the world that he created.

Goolrick created a great story, but his sense of place, especially the barren, but at times beauty of winter in the upper midwest was what kept me turning the pages. With me composing Gales of November while reading this book it made me want to create the same kind of narrative. Not just music, and maybe not pictures, and more of a narrative. I’ve already started that as I quoted some of the Gales of November wrtings here.

I don’t know what the combination of a written narrative and music will do for the listener, or if it will provide the experience that I try to create. I doubt it, as all of our life experiences inform our feelings about art, etc… but I’m still tempted to try. I’ve also considered doing some kind of video montage, as well as or more specifically, some kind of movie that possibly has a story and uses music and imagery to set the tone, but I don’t know that I could see something of that magnitude through. Right now, it’s the birth phase, and I’m enjoying that. One thing is for sure, though, this is likely to be the most complete recording that I’ve ever done.

It seemed like an ironic realization while composing for the tentatively-titled Gales of November that I realized that one of my favorite symphonies of all time was Claude Debussy’s La Mer, or in English, The Sea.

The timbre and harmony that I work to achieve with my recordings, in general,  but specifically, The Phantom Light and now Gales of November, was nothing short of trying to recreate, sonically, an impression that I’ve taken from Debussy’s La Mer, or his Noctures, or Pelleas and Melisande, or in Ravel’s case Daphnis et Chloe, but without an orchestra or frankly the music theory knowledge to nail down the harmonic structure; instead using only my ears as a guide.

I would like to post some unmastered drafts of this recording, but I can’t say when that will be. In any case, it’s coming along excellently, and I think fans of the work will be pleased with the outcome.

The recording of the new project, or Gales of November, as I’ve been tentatively calling it, continues. I’ve got approximately sixty minutes of music so far, but I’m only part way through the layering and continuing to develop new material even as the layering of other tracks continues. This recording really is turning out to be an extension of The Phantom Light, from emotional, as well as a sonic perspective.

I’m even thinking that I might even be patient enough to “shop” this around to some labels to reach a bit more of an audience. Usually, I’m too excited to get the work out there, and I forgo attempting to work with some of the great labels and benefactors of the genre, such as Infraction, Hypnos, and Kranky, but who knows.