Hi! Words will surely fail to do justice to the precious madness that has shaped these last few days, so, for the time being, I won’t digress: yesterday, Anachronistic Compositional Values was fully released, now available on Bandcamp through EVEL. And surprise surprise indeed, words fall short once again to express my gratitude (I’ll try, though) to EVEL, to Alfonso (sorry, and thanks from the bottom of my heart for your sleepless nights while mastering), and to all of you who read and listen. Your support on Bandcamp, and all other manifestations of social memedia, is invaluable.
Go, text!
While it’s possible that I have never publicly stated it, I’m sure my friends must have had to endure my claims that I don’t seek to be a beatmaker (it requires an emphatically minimalist intelligence that I don’t possess, or that I don’t have the patience to develop), nor a producer (the oceans of technique and technology suffocate me), but a composer. These three profiles can indeed overlap, but they cement their respective identities insofar as they proceed in different ways, and insofar as they yield equally distinguishable musical materials. How such differences manifest themselves (pure aesthetics?) is beyond the scope of this text, a mere introduction, justification (excuse) and heartfelt written token of gratitude (thank you, EVEL, Alfonso and all those who read and listen!).
Listing some of my particular musical preoccupations (obsessions) might be appropriate, however: color and harmonic richness, which enables and stimulates the design of large-scale tonal plans; a holistic conception of musical form, each parameter controlled by the composer in necessary and constant dialogue with every other parameter; directionality of discourse, based on the classical dialectic of tension-release at the small scale; expressive and emotional variety, etc. If I have succeeded in arriving at such high ideals in Anachronistic Compositional Values, may your fresh ears let me know; mine, for the time being, no longer discern where they stand on these pieces.
The overall title encompasses multiple meanings; the titles of each track do not. (Has instrumental music ever meant anything?) When I published Failures, I anticipated a potential return to old compositional procedures: historically classical, intimately familiar. And so, after a number of releases pounded via Audacity, I have once again made peace with the discipline, meticulousness, attention to detail and forethought that working with sequencers requires, even when the outcome proves to be messy. I have once again dismissed external samples and human voices altogether, but nor have I fussed over insatiable searches in synthesizer and effects libraries (I never do: I remain comfortable near presets).
The implementation of any global tonal plan has fallen by the wayside, admittedly, but without detriment to relishing, once again, the expressive potential of each modulatory instant or episode. For I strive, however difficult, to never lose sight of Schubert’s tonal transformations, whether catastrophic or gradual, nor of Beethoven’s attempts at manipulating musical time, while we’re at it: these are conceptually to blame for how the timeline in Anachronistic Compositional Values unfolds, violently disfigured.
Anachronisms, historical errors, temporal displacement. Parachronisms? For EVEL, and for all of you, this is Elektronische Musik: classical, historically consolidated; nothing new, in fact, but always attractive to those who do not have an orchestra at their disposal and still understand the upper stages of composition as if they were orchestrating for a virtual, synthetic and, (only) at times, dehumanized ensemble.
Thank you, thank you, thank you all!
cosmic lithium :) 