Hello friends,
It’s my birthday today, and I get to celebrate by sharing some new music – a piece for stretched piano and pump organ. I go on for a bit below with the story of how it came together, but this happened fast and instinctually, so I want to release it the same way. It comes in two parts, and I’m going to put them both on my Bandcamp page – with accompanying videos on YouTube – on May 2nd as Butterfly Gardens.
For you, my newsletter family, here's a link to the (currently unlisted) video for Part 1 in full.
The whole thing is a bit of an experiment really – but I hope you enjoy it. It’s the closest thing to purely ambient music I’ve made in a long time. I have a lot juicing in the slow cooker at the moment, but something about this felt meaningful for me to share now. And you all are meaningful to me too, so I wanted to share it with you first. As always, thanks for being here.
About Butterfly Gardens:
One day near the end of winter, I was teetering at the edge of myself and feeling some deeper sort of darkness rolling in – not just over me, but over what seemed like the entire living planet. Throughout the day I’d struggled to keep my heart in one piece, so I went to where I usually go when I need to quiet the mind, a small slice of a park near the expressway called Butterfly Gardens. Sitting on a bench with my headphones, I stumbled into a pair of recordings I’d made five years earlier, the last time things felt this intensely obscured for me. The recordings were some loops I’d constructed using my piano with Brian and Kelli’s endlessly giving invention, a Monome Grid. Using the Grid and some accompanying homespun software I was able to stretch the piano into these sort of asymmetrical patterns that seemed to want to go on endlessly.
I listened, and remembered liking the results when I made them, though they had then and since always felt incomplete. In that moment of rediscovery though, I was struck with the need to finish them. I rushed home and sat at my Estey pump organ and immediately recorded a sort of duet, I suppose, with that me of five years ago. In some surprising way, in that moment, we were able to comfort each other across half a decade.
I recorded the organ in one take, and the whole thing was done in less than an hour. I listened back, and was a bit surprised by how much I enjoyed it. On a whim I sent it to a few friends and the feedback was overwhelming. People I trust encouraged me to release it publicly, so it went to the chef himself Nicholas Principe and his magic ears and his magic little metal boxes. He mixed and mastered it on very short notice, and what he sent back had a whole new dimension to it.
I can overthink things, and as the process for putting together a longer piece of music is usually measured in years (for me), there is often plenty of opportunity to overthink. For this, I wanted to consciously turn away from that, and to live the words I keep using in my writings and my life: impulse and instinct. Even if these two instruments were recorded years apart, Butterfly Gardens feels, to me, very of its own moment and place, and how I want to offer it to you is a reflection of that. So here we are. Thanks for listening.
Hear/See Butterfly Gardens Pt. 1
Love,
David