I Will Never Eat At That Particular Buffet Again #disquiet0223-layeredsameness by Nate Trier

This week's assignment was to record one "loop" many times (between 4 and 40) and then layer them so it sounds like one thing. My approach to this assignment evolved as I worked with it, so I ended up piecing my three experiments together into one long piece.

I started with a fast piano riff that starts in something like a whole tone scale and ends in A melodic minor over the course of five phrases. In my head I heard this as a fast phrase with very classical articulation. However, during my morning recording session my body wasn't cooperating (I will refer you to the title of this piece and then we will never speak of it again) and I ended up making quite a few mistakes and defaulting to a jazzier articulation. I ended up in a place similar to Rzewski's "Les Moutons de Panurge," in which the performers have to perform a knotty phrase, and the mistakes become part of the piece. I also realized that once I had about 8 layers going on, the mistakes wouldn't be noticeable and would even contribute to the piece by adding some variety. (Life lesson: if you make a mistake, it will probably be lost in the cacophony and people won't notice...)

On playback, I realized that while it was a pretty striking sound (like 18 pianos falling down a stairwell or a roomfull of young piano students all practicing the same Schoenberg melody over and over until they get it right...), there wasn't much space or variety.

So my next step was to move to an organ and play a variation of the melody (bottom note of each phrase, retrograded) very slowly. My goal was to for the long tones of the organ to overlap and generate harmonies.

Then I thought it might be nice to leave space for some unpredictable hockets, so I rewrote the melody to much sparser and with rests for the other layers to occasionally poke through (some digital clipping emerged at this stage, I'm not sure why and at this point I didn't want to go back and re-record 8 layers of a two-minute melody!)

I like to think that this piece is a mini-sonata with an A theme and a B theme, and then the A theme reemerges, altered by its experience with the B theme. Or, anthropomorphically speaking, the piano starts out totally frantic and trying to impress. The organ tells it to chill out and just savor its time. The piano takes the advice and relaxes.

Some day I'd like to re-do this one and implement these ideas a little more fully: the organ notes should have been longer to really let the harmonies linger, and the final piano melody should have been sparser to leave more room for interaction with the other layers. But, with some tweaking I could make this into a cool piece to perform with real musicians.

* * * * *
More on this 223rd weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Record multiple, slightly varying takes on the same looped composition in this project by Monome’s Brian Crabtree”) at:

http://disquiet.com/0223/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/junto/

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:

http://disquiet.com/forums/