50 Cent Pieces

   Solo Guitars for Electric Guitar and Live Electronics
   Groundswells for Cello and Live Electronics

For my 50th birthday I wanted to focus on composing and performing more music again, and offering it for up for more than me (and my family) to hear. ’50 Cent Pieces’ is a snapshot of where I am now. I’m still learning to compose, still learning cello, and have come back to (and am still learning) guitar.
My 40s were quieter in this regard. I have had a lot time to reflect about where I want to be going and the kind of music I want to be making. As always, there is a lot of learning and honing to be done, and that is exciting to me.
That all being said, I want to point out that these works mostly came out darker than I would have thought. The pieces on this album have been composed or worked on since 2021. I can say that with the way my post-pandemic life has changed, along with other challenging life events that have occurred, that some moodiness has found its way into this music. Plus, minor keys and moody tunes just sound cool.
But please make no mistake. I’m a very happy, fortunate, and appreciative person. I can’t begin to count how much my family and life bring me constant amazement and joy. Don’t let the dark tones fool you. At 50, everything is pretty rad.
I hope you enjoy.

Downloads for ’50 Cent Pieces’

WAV format – 48k, 32-bit files (largest)
ALAC format – 48K, 32-bit lossless files (still big)
MP3 format – VBR mp3 – probably sounds just fine (and much smaller files)

‘Solo Guitars’ started life in a very different way. About 15 years ago, I had the chance to do a workshop with the violist Garth Knox after a concert featuring interactive electronics. To demonstrate how the computer was using his playing, we turned on a few parts of different pieces we had performed. Rather than him playing music from those works, he improvised against whatever the computer produced, which captured his playing to create a feedback loop of human and extended performance.

The parts in ‘Solo Guitars’ uses this as its basis. They each use one or two electronics processes that I’ve created, and a loose structure to guide me through an improvisation of the piece. The works here each use a different guitar as well as unique processing to create each work. ‘Preverb’ and ‘Lines’ are both played on guitars I built, while ‘Aloquin’ is played on my very resonant D’Angelico EXL hollowbody. 

‘Groundswells’ for cello and electronics was mostly written in Lincoln City, Oregon while vacationing just off the Pacific coast. As with ‘Lines’ – the waves and tides of the ocean play heavily into what I want to try and capture. The enormity of the ocean itself, how small I feel when next to it, but also the millions of details in that environment. Sea spray, the wind, the sand, and the nature of that area all contribute to an amazing whole that we get to experience.

All of these recordings are single take, live captures of the instrument and electronics being performed simultaneously. They are not perfect, but they are human.