Ainsi

Thirty-some years ago when I was first learning about the roots of a lot of the industrial, goth, post punk, no wave, & experimental music I discovered the 1960s classical composers who bowed piano strings, manipulated audio tape, used metronomes as instruments, & created soundscapes rather than melodies. Ligeti, Crumb, Cage, Stockhausen, Riley, Copland, the list goes on forever. In a pre-internet world where record stores were dominated by indie rock, finding the music was difficult with a lot of reading books from the library describing the compositions & how traditions & norms were being broken making imaginings of the music in my head that often had little to do with the music when I would actually hear it years later. I did eventually find a store that specialized in classical music & the owner spent time with me pointing me in the direction I was seeking & seemed genuinely excited to have someone to talk to about Ligeti, but of course they closed one day & I have yet to find someone with his depth of knowledge without pretension. At any rate a few years later I started Small Life Form to experiment with sound in the ways I thought appropriate to my materials at hand as I knew I would never have the discipline to end up in a space to write for an orchestra. Now feeling full circle I find myself listening to a classical station on the radio that fades in & out of range & recording snippets on my phone to make loops to stretch & reverse & reverberate & distort. It makes me feel young again. A savage need to explore sound in a way that doesn't use the tricks & clichés I've developed over 30 years while still being influenced by them. Collaborations with composers dead centuries before I was born. This is Small Life Form in the fall of 2025.