l a n d s c a p e s is a project where massive natural spaces get squeezed into a series of one minute boxes. Having this artificial time limit started as a way to make composing feel more finite and manageable for me, yet what emerges are these little sound paintings that contain vast detail and density. The beginning/middle/end movements all revolve around a four chord progression, while the four interludes serve as one minute expansions of each of these four chords. This is the fractal experience of being in nature, the zooming in to look at the veins of a leaf and then zooming out to see this entire geography stitching together before you.
And of course natural spaces are inhabited by people too. After the first solo project (“desert”) it hit me that I’d stumbled backwards into this highly structured yet organic framework that I could share with other musicians. So the project evolved into an excuse for me to make stuff with other people, to invite them into my sonic blueprint by putting them in front of a microphone and saying “we have one minute to create a thing...go.” Then I get a lot of things in post, fumbling around in my DAW to layer and re-layer all of these recordings into new sound chimeras.
There is a strong element of process to these works. You can hear my ideas as a composer unfolding in real time, the loose musical raw materials in the earlier movements snapping together to form the cohesive “end” movement. You could imagine this as the sonic form of natural processes like erosion or weathering, but I suppose it could also be the process of the built world, the human rationality of ordering things. And so what results is something internal and external, human and natural, my (and my collaborator’s) musicianship resolving with the topography of the natural world.
Listen to the projects:
