"The Quiet Below" ~ Interlude Tracks
This album was almost an EP. I’d recorded the whole release, packaged it up, and even sent it out to a few labels.
And then, as tends to happen, something shifted and my musical focus changed.
I started experimenting with asynchronous loops. Not as a compositional technique, exactly, but as a way of escaping music that made sense — of letting go of structure for its own sake. The two tracks that came out of that process fit so naturally alongside everything else on The Quiet Below that the album suddenly felt complete in a way it hadn’t before.
The tool at the centre of it all is my Boomerang III Phrase Looper, which can run four loops of entirely different lengths simultaneously. Because none of them share a common cycle, they’re always falling in and out of phase with each other, the same loops endlessly re-contextualising themselves. I’d set them running and just listen, sometimes for ten or fifteen minutes at a time, following wherever they went.
Early last year I played an improvised set with Emergent Sounds for Resonant Bodies, a performance built around Josef Albers’ colour studies. The central idea being that a colour’s meaning isn’t fixed, but shifts entirely depending on what surrounds it. Our improvisation worked the same way: the same theme could feel like tension, grief, joy or relief depending on what it brushed up against.
These loop experiments came from the same place. A melody lands one way when the second loop enters two seconds in. It lands somewhere completely different when that loop arrives twelve seconds later. And the next time the phrase comes around, it’ll mean something else entirely. The music stays the same. The context keeps moving.