Getting experimental

The image and messages above recently came to me in a dream. As I inked them into my composition book, I understood why I’ve become so drawn to noise and experimental music: we're in a liminal space between the signals of the past and those of the future. Distortion abounds as the signals switch.

I've adapted to this flux by opening my ears and listening to everything with as little judgment as possible. When I listen deeply enough, most sounds have a peculiar beauty. (These ideas are, of course, not new.) I've also contributed to the following experimental-music projects:

Cities and Memory, #StayHomeSounds, Oxford, U.K.
I reimagined the call of a scops owl in Thessaloniki, Greece, originally recorded by Chrysoula Athanasiou, who wrote, "In the silence of coronavirus we discover new things!" Explore quarantine sounds from cities across the globe here.

Robin Sloan's "Integration Loop"
Author Robin Sloan blogged about the haunted history of William Basinski's "Distintegration Loop" and issued a call for contributions for a new "integration loop." I sent Sloan a recording of stacked vocal harmonies, which he incorporated into the new loop. He wrote: "In my imagination, each contribution is a rung in a ladder out of the pit of confusion and loss, all of us both (a) carrying the melody forward and (b) being carried by it, up towards something new, something whole."

April Fields, by Silber Records, Sanford, NC
I play in a side project called EVQ with Frank DiMauro (synths), John Shannon (electric guitar), and Ted Johnson (electric guitar). Our track "Morphogenesis" was released as part of Silber Records's album April Fields, which is a "collection of field recordings & structures built from them. Near silence, ambient walls, industrial noise, & even electro no wave."