I’ve dedicated quite some time during this past year to the laborious task of filling out application forms for many, many artistic residencies, composition competitions and open calls organized by several respectable cultural institutions all across Europe. None of them have come to fruition. However (!!!), I refuse to let the resulting body of work go to waste, for you all might get a nice kick out of it. I certainly do.
This is kind of a weird release, really. While I’ve been delving for years into the aesthetic practices of glitch art, rarely do I find myself chopping conventional musical syntax as fiercely as I have for Six Movements for the Disjointed Youth, for instance. Notwithstanding its structural ricketiness, the piece might still sound familiar to your ears, nonetheless, for it’s built upon the shattered remains of the motivic and thematic material I’d developed for my (few and far between) 2024 live shows. At first glance, Yerevan appears to behave in a similar overanxious fashion, although its overall timbral palette and melodic attributes (pentaphonic patterns interlocking over heavily processed stringed instruments and mostly recognizable percussion) place the piece in a different sonic world altogether. Truth be told, you can easily hear that I’m an utter ignoramus when it comes to the musical history and culture of Armenia. But let’s not dwell too much on the chosen title. I find it suits the piece, in its own peculiar and clumsily misleading ways.
As to what to say about On Hope, Intrusive Thoughts, and Light, I have not the slightest clue. It stands as an unapologetically amorphous blob, from start to finish were it not for its carefully balanced yet unassertive tripartite design. Again, rarely, if ever, do I dip my toes in the open-ended voids of minimalism, or in the stillness of drone (so to speak), as explicitly as what’s here revealed.
Anyways, I invite you all to celebrate Failures (now available on all streaming platforms). Reach your own conclusions on this somewhat atypical collection, elaborate your own critiques. I suspect I’ll soon need to steer back towards more refreshing waters, and to allow for my compositional duties to be, once again, determined by the proper use of sequencers and piano rolls. But we’ll just see.
cosmic lithium :) 