you haven't been paying attention to my Twitter posts, there ralph.. spending too much time with your whiskey and gear!
sadly... the album name is likely going to change from the one listed in the Wire! d'oh!
well.. for a bit of information...
last october i went to york university (uk) for a residency program and spent a week recording and looping their extensive gamelan instrument collection. i developed a kyma patch for looping and created long recordings of subtle loops.
needless to say, i did not play the gamelan very traditionally, but was more interested in the surfaces, the wooden stands they were mounted on, ebowing strings, etc...
i made a lot of recordings during the residency and have spent the last few months here at home finessing them into an album. it's been quite a daunting experience... the work has been very personal to me and i'm not sure how well it will translate to the outside world!
every sound on the album is gamelan, kyma does do some synthetic bits here and there, but for the most part just pitch shifting and looping. the album feels like a natural progression from "weather & worn" and holds a lot more similarities to that album and "stil." than it does "northern.".
it's very much night time music.. very slow, very drawn out.. very boring!
the title listed in The Wire was "Shoals".... a shoal is defined as:
1. a place where a sea, river, or other body of water is shallow.
2. a sandbank or sand bar in the bed of a body of water, esp. one that is exposed above the surface of the water at low tide.
the idea of surfaces, scraping... was the inspiration for the album and title. the recordings i made contain as many sounds of me simply walking around the room and accidentally brushing into instruments as it does me playing them! nearly half of the sonic information is incidental, accidental sounds. while "shoals" to me is a great word and i like this idea of very shallow water brushing over the tops of rocks.... the album really has nothing to do with *water*... so i have been playing with the idea of calling the album "rust"... which i like because it is still about surfaces, but also the very degraded, aged and natural decay of those surfaces. there is also a lot of metal on the album... broken strings, metal bells, etc.
happy now, ralph!?!
this is the first i've really talked about it.. making solo full-length albums is very difficult for me.. it's very hard to put so much work into something in this extended format, and then let it out to the public to be critiqued....
oh, i've' also toyed with the idea of calling it "shoals, rust"
but i've rarely done a "proper" full-length with more than a one-word title!
