Album Description
“The electronic manipulation of the original audio continues the theme of my previous releases - found audio, older pieces = manipulated to become new again. Taking an expression of my previous artistic self, honoring that expression and then using electronics to make it feel new again. Like painting over or editing an old photograph.
The original string quartet featured on this record was written for my senior thesis at Princeton University. This recording is the live performance from 2012 by a string quartet of students from Juilliard. I always was happy with sections of the quartet and unhappy with others. After the process of making my found piano + electronics album I decided to begin experimenting with editing certain sections and adding electronics (you can listen to that piano album here, it is a series of live recordings from my iphone on various pianos then manipulated by electronics). The whole process of adding electronics to the string quartet was live/spontaneous as all of the electronics were performed live to tape with audio engineer Chris Sorem.
I wrote the original quartet when my Grandfather was in hospice and dying. It is dedicated to him and his lifelong love of chamber music. In reworking this quartet using various guitar pedals and FX boxes, I found myself thinking about my other Grandfather who was in hospice ten years after the original composition of the work. My working title for the reworked / manipulated Quartet was “the things we pass on through our genes.” I was thinking a lot about inherited trauma (my Grandfather, the one who passed away most recently was an Auschwitz survivor) and how that gets watered down and expressed throughout generations. The music, the original live recordings, being processed, re-amplified, effected, became the trauma in some ways. Some parts of the piece disappeared. Some parts re-emerged in new and haunting ways. A lot of it felt random: setting a guitar pedal to do something interesting and then leaning into the product, dealing with the result as it comes.”
-Jackson Greenberg