Sound was my first medium. We had a piano in our apartment because my mother wanted her kids to learn to play. Someone in our building got rid of one and we took it in. I was an early riser and loved to explore the instrument.
After being told by my parents that if I wanted to play the piano at sunrise I needed to be very quiet I found myself experimenting with just how quiet I could play and still make out the tones. I had no interest in playing anything familiar, I was instead fascinated by what listening and playing was like at very quiet levels. Looking back, my output at the time may have sounded like Morton Feldman’s music.
The experience of playing so quietly, so liminally, and so privately became very important to me. At school I was identified as a musician and studied various instruments, played in ensembles, etc, but I never abandoned my interest in exploring twilight sounds. In fact, that practice opened the door to what I came to know later as aesthetic experience when I began to recognize similar thought-feelings when I was around other objects and situations.
As I grew I noticed a split between the music I made for the public (orchestras, bands, etc.) and the private experimentations that I continued – eventually adding electronics/tape into my technique.
As a teenager I recall writing in notebooks about the complications of collectivizing personal experience.
A lot has happened since then.
Today I realize my interests have returned to where they started. Being in that twilight space of thought-feeling where the art object functions as a portal to and a presence within an irreducible, subjective beingness. Where patience is the key that unlocks this portal, as my chatty, analytical mind can struggle mightily to remain in its daylight domain – a place where Art functions as an instruction set, information, a ride of some kind, generating and dissipating various recognizable emotional or analytical states – a means of being taught how to interpret the world.
The sound/music I prefer is experienced similarly to the way one looks at a painting – rather than the way one watches a theatrical work. Yes, there is a temporal element – in the form of an unfolding, but time as a measure is irrelevant. Yes, there is a contemplative element, but the ebb and flow of mind, from thought to idea and back again seems to benefit from moments of polarity.
I suppose my aesthetics could be described as subtractive.
In my experience, twilight music / liminal work, as subtle or quiet as it may be, is anything but hypnotic because it unlocks a vastness of experience whose illimitability seems to be proportional to its nuance and subtlety, To me, the more formal something is, the more symmetrical, the more obviously structured or theatric, the more it caters to the formation of one’s public self. Something very useful but very limited.
It took me a long time to understand how what I created privately as an artist – which was fundamentally a very personal awareness/state of mind – had any relevance for someone else.
I know now that if one can materialize something that evoked an irreducible, subjective awareness personally then that object can function as a portal to another into their own irreducible, subjective awareness – and while the details cannot be ultimately shared, or the experiences precisely compared or replicated, there is tremendous value in the experience and that value is both private and public.
This is what I am as an artist.
current CV (2009-Present) / pre 2009 CV