time in the forest

[01] a young boy

[02] apprehensions

[03] some peace

SOME RIGHTS RESERVED 2007

time in the forest is the resultant EP from the music I recorded for a good friend’s art final.  Adam is very into process artwork and installations.  The piece we collaborated on was a sculpture designed as the centerpiece of a series he did as a senior at school about his family’s deer-hunting heritage and his interaction with it in a modern context.  The sculpture was a taxidermied deer-head which played sound — any 2 of 8 different audio tracks.  4 of these tracks were ambient mono-modal compositions I did using only acoustic guitar (and Logic).  The other 4 tracks were compiled sounds Adam recorded in the field on his family’s annual hunting trip.  The piece pushed the faux-pas of interaction with fine art, as the user chose which 2 of the 8 tracks would be playing by inserting audio cables into jacks which were installed in the deer-head at various points.

This was probably the most creatively exciting collaboration I’d ever done, and felt very much like my experiences working with scoring film.  The integration of music with other art media is probably one of my most lasting compositional fascinations.  Anyhow, while the music I wrote, when out of context, was far from engaging to listen to, I felt I needed to do something more with it.  Particularly, I wanted to put it in a form where Adam and I could enjoy it as a memoir of the year and a half collaboration it came out of.  To that end, I mixed the four songs into a 3 song EP.  Since all the tracks were meant to be able to be played simultaneously by the sculpture’s observer, I used at least 2 on every song, and they weave in and out.  The first track focuses primarily on the first 2 songs I did, the second on the third, and the last has all four in it, though emphasizes the fourth.  For more information on my writing and recording of the project, check out my blog entry about it.