Prior to my interest in electronics, or simultaneously, there is a rather classical background in piano and studies in Musicology. From this vantage point, it was a bit over a decade ago when I first saw in a then unfamiliar sphere of music, that which we call (or imagine as) “electronic” music, extremely attractive possibilities regarding all that had to do not only with color or timbre (this is usually the norm), but with onstage performance as well. Indeed, in machines and computers I found, at last, tools that allowed for sufficiently convoluted music to be performed live on one’s own: one gained in autonomy, though, of course, also at the risk of isolation and loneliness.
If such was my interest, one could ask why it took me so long to bring my music to a live setting (January 13, 2024, marks my onstage debut as Cosmic Lithium). I find two explanations: firstly, for years I erred in simply neglecting the need to perform live, nowadays more so than ever, when the recording industry is in the state it is in; secondly, I have spent just as many years struggling with finding ways to reconcile, on the one hand, the spontaneity or ease of change, variation and development of musical ideas that I personally had come to know through piano or classical repertoire and, on the other hand, an emphatically repetitive “way of doing” or approach to music aesthetics which we tend to associate with “electronics”. And indeed, while this sphere of music is very broad, and there is no harm in asking every once in a while what electronic music actually is, when electronic technology intervenes to a greater or lesser extent in the production of almost all the music we consume, it does seem reasonable to identify a relationship between the mechanism or procedure of repetition and the electronic technology that has been used to create so much of what has defined the musical soundscape of the last several decades.
As mentioned above, I have spent many years obsessed with finding a way to escape the formal limitations of this specific approach to music-making, especially when I have not the slightest clue about programming, which is how many other producers have managed to solve their respective headaches in this regard. In my case, I had not succeeded at all in resolving the issue from within the studio: I have been releasing music independently since 2015, works that could very well be labeled as “musical sculptures”, detailed, premeditated, fixed in recordings, inflexible, and very boring to take to the live setting, since they do not admit modifications without the proposals of their respective musical discourses suffering. Thus, here’s yet one more task I still needed to tackle: to simply make peace with this schism between what I do in the studio and what I would be able or dare to do live for now.
So where have I ended up in this exploration around the formal limitations inherent to making music with gadgets and computers? Essentially, I’ve come to focus all work prior to the live performance on the smallest compositional scale, which is where I believe problems naturally arise (tiny at first, only to then spread and spiral out of control if unattended). And so, drawing on the technical and aesthetic possibilities offered by gadgets and computers, I zoom in on the loop, the primordial repetitive bit, the smallest musical building block the machines have at hand, and focus on expanding, twisting or distorting it from the simple, the transparent or the intelligible to the complex, the irregular or the asymmetrical, in such a way that the superimpositions of several layers of loops will be hardly replicable in subsequent live events or renditions (if not impossible to replicate). The overall, large-scale form of the live performance thus emerges, ideally, different on each occasion, despite the smallest available building blocks remaining unchanged. Apropos of the global form, I don’t pre-program a setlist before a performance or rehearsal either: given all the material I have at my disposal to play and to tinker with, what interests me most is the challenge of shaping the sequence of pieces and fragments to be performed in real time, taking into account what I am playing at the very moment, where I intend to go and, why not say it, the technical or aesthetic mishaps I bump into while playing as well. Admittedly, nevertheless, over the course of rehearsals, certain comfortable patterns in decision-making tend to settle or take root: patterns which will surely be difficult to break away from in “times of crisis” during a live performance.
If I talk a great deal about formal issues, it’s because I’m much less interested in the technological stuff per se. My setup is relatively simple, unglamorous. I’m afraid I’ll find myself while onstage looking at the computer screen a lot, which is the center of all operations, but I’m at peace with it, and I hope you are too! The most colorful tool I currently use is probably a TASCAM multitrack portastudio, from which I play musical fragments on cassette tapes that were previously recorded in the studio. These many fragments, interludes, cuts, sketches, vignettes, randomly selected while playing live, allow me to hopefully achieve variety and spontaneity in each performance. And I expect to cede control to the brink of chaos, since I now don’t even recall the order in which the musical micro-pieces of each cassette were arranged. I think of it as a conscious therapeutic exercise, and the same thing goes for the noise/noisy or accidental side of my music. In sum, every element that converges on this impromptu approach favors a mindset in which stumbling upon instances of accidental and fleeting beauty may be cherished as the mutable, fragile, ultimate goal of each live performance. Or one can only hope.
On an aesthetic level, the smaller musical forms and the fragmentation of musical discourse, which I think is exemplified here as much as in the mini-album that the folks at 12 Min Albums published for me a few months back, have interested me for a long, long time. (A dear place will always be held in my heart by the sweet conciseness that I came to know and love through the short interludes that the duo Boards of Canada weaves between the larger pieces of their albums, Chopin’s collection of Preludes, or the Beethovenian Bagatelles, to name but a few of the many and diverse marvels that inhabit the rich universe of musical miniatures.)
As I closing note, my use of the not obsolete but retro technology of the cassette (still being manufactured for new music expressly conceived for this medium and still celebrated for its distinctive sonic qualities) responds to purely emotional, nostalgic factors, since it was on cassette that I started recording years and years ago. Let’s see if after all this time I’ve managed to arrive to a satisfactory destination.
XOXO ;)
cosmic lithium :) 