In my thirties I have thought a lot about time, and what it means for my identity. I am aware that I am changing, or that my brain has organized different facets of self across its perception of time passing. I am not sure which. The more of these facets I have glimpsed, the more fragmented my self-conception becomes, and I peer hopefully backwards and forwards, looking for the integratively familiar the way O. Henry's Della observes herself in a sequence of longitudinal strips.
This piece is a single take of improvised piano and sound-on-sound recording, performed on my '80s Yamaha touring piano and 4ms' brilliant Dual Looping Delay. After some introductory free play (including a brief allusion to Music for Airports) and the capture and manipulation of some of these phrases, I settle into a very simple, repeated chordal figure until, approximately four and a half minutes into the recording, I stop playing and finish the piece by exploring the content of the Dual Looping Delay's recording buffers until it has all faded into silence.
The chordal figure here is like my breath, an anchor around which I can perceive a steady stream of fleeting musical thoughts and impulses floating by. As I play them, each of these thoughts and impulses is captured for me to observe, repeat, replay forwards or backwards, divide into granules, or let slip by, in a dialectic recollection that recreates the remembered moment differently and as part of the musical context in which the next thought or impulse exists.
I think the peace I feel in this recording is in its mode of integration. It paints a picture of me continually interacting with a self that existed just moments prior, iteratively superimposing a newly created self with its distinct facets in a way that neither dominates, nor is dominated by, the past. The integration offered here does not require sameness: its seams are on display, relentless layers of difference beautiful and strange. One man here is created out of many, but in a way that relieves me of my striving to collapse multiplicity of self.
This piece is a single take of improvised piano and sound-on-sound recording, performed on my '80s Yamaha touring piano and 4ms' brilliant Dual Looping Delay. After some introductory free play (including a brief allusion to Music for Airports) and the capture and manipulation of some of these phrases, I settle into a very simple, repeated chordal figure until, approximately four and a half minutes into the recording, I stop playing and finish the piece by exploring the content of the Dual Looping Delay's recording buffers until it has all faded into silence.
The chordal figure here is like my breath, an anchor around which I can perceive a steady stream of fleeting musical thoughts and impulses floating by. As I play them, each of these thoughts and impulses is captured for me to observe, repeat, replay forwards or backwards, divide into granules, or let slip by, in a dialectic recollection that recreates the remembered moment differently and as part of the musical context in which the next thought or impulse exists.
I think the peace I feel in this recording is in its mode of integration. It paints a picture of me continually interacting with a self that existed just moments prior, iteratively superimposing a newly created self with its distinct facets in a way that neither dominates, nor is dominated by, the past. The integration offered here does not require sameness: its seams are on display, relentless layers of difference beautiful and strange. One man here is created out of many, but in a way that relieves me of my striving to collapse multiplicity of self.