2007, 'expanded beat' period. King's first long-form/multipart work, a 5-part suite inspired by the video for Jay-Z's "Blue Magic" - esp. the night scenes and Damien Hirst imagery, an uneasy work of lavish nihilism and morbidity.
Art design (c) FugueXV, 2007.

David King - 'Blue Magic' Suite

2007, 'expanded beat' period. A cinematic 2004 beat reorchestrated in 2007 for string quartet. "I reorchestrated it in 2007, presented it to violinist Daniel Bernard Rounmain at Clarice Smith @ University of MD, along with a setting of excerpts from The Audacity Of Hope.....Often think of this as the twin of 'Til Human Voices Wake Us..." - 2015
Art design (c) FugueXV, 2007.

David King - Black Gold

2013, post-NS return/2nd 'expanded beat' "autobiographical' period. "In this third phase, we begin to see the many mature themes emerge....". 
"Razor Sharp" is the first beat after a 3 year exile from audio while developing the New Style. It's a fractured landscape from the Naples events, more romantic than 'Phase 2 sketches' - a vocal but otherworldly portamento "bend language" - but still barren and unforgiving."
"Why did he revisit beats at all? "The New Style was published, it was on the site...Plus I wanted to revisit the historical lineage and 'play on their field' again, limited by audio. That inspired me." 
Art design (c) FugueXV, 2013.

David King - Razor Sharp + Interludes (Bend Language, Sketches 1 & 2)

2013, post-NS return/2nd 'expanded beat' period.  Instrumental to the spoken-word blues called "Got". Along with the "Phase 2" suite, "Goldenrod" suite, "Razor Sharp" and "Sermons", grappling with existential reality and depression. - 2015
"Got nowhere to go
Got nowhere to be..."
"There was a distinction in the '50s/'60s between gospel/soul as social genres and blues as the introverted relic of a sad existence that they wanted to move past."
Art design (c) FugueXV, 2013.

David King - 'Got' (Instrumental)

2013, post-NS/2nd 'expanded beat' "autobiographical" period. "The Phase 2 Sketches are the most intense and visceral exploration of the 2009 'Month 2' themes, representing both dissolution and escalating existential crises. In "Untitled" a catastrophe comes ever closer, out of the same void as the Echo Settings, but more aggressively. "There was no light."
"Walterboro" is named after Walterboro, SC - the halfway point between King's home in Wheaton, MD and Opus 1's setting, Naples, FL.
The 'convergence' of Pt. 4 is most notable, as it's a shadow of The New Style in audio form, with the first 3 parts representing the Pre-NS 'pool' and Pt. 4 as a second-generation development with new derived semantic meaning, especially within a 'domain' - here, existentialism, a wasteland.
Art design (c) FugueXV, 2013.

Phase 2 Sketches

2014, post-NS/2nd 'expanded beat' "autobiographical" period.  Used in "CKND" (Cool Kids Never Die) by Ben Famous, 2015. "The original was a drumless composition representing jewel-like phenomena - light effects from jewelry and chandeliers, horizons, stars, all symbolism from the New Style and his transfigured Naples world." - 2015
Art design (c) FugueXV, 2014.

David King - Jewels

https://twitter.com/dkingIO     www.ideasoriginal.com
2015, late 2nd 'expanded beat' "autobiographical" period. Composed and sung in the idiom of the French jazz-fusion group Cortex, on the 40th anniversary of their landmark album Troupeau Bleu. "I always seem to do a couple returns to my influences, where I empathize with a style almost verbatim, often against my better judgment - but this in particular represents meaningful closure on Cortex, from when I first heard "Huit Octobre 1971" on a Scorpio61 sample mix in 2005." - 2015
Art design (c) FugueXV, 2015.

David King - Cortex

2015, late 2nd 'expanded beat' "autobiographical" period. Meditation on death. "...The idea here is a dialogue between the different sampled statements {...} It's one of the closest precursors to the kind of pieces the audio version of NS will have, due to its symbolism, though the samples will be composed" - 2015
https://twitter.com/dkingIO     www.ideasoriginal.com
Art design (c) FugueXV, 2015.

David King - Everything Is Possible

2015, late 2nd 'expanded beat' "autobiographical" period. "A distant lumbering drumbeat, a tribe in a primeval forest. "The little solos imply some extended multi-section bend-language transfiguration, with solos in different symbolic modes, similar to a raga...but instead they disappear back into the beat..." - 2015
https://twitter.com/dkingIO     www.ideasoriginal.com
Art design (c) FugueXV, 2015.

David King - Rituals

2015, late 2nd 'expanded beat' "autobiographical" period.  Toward the New Style and audio synthesis, one of the more directly biographical works in the 2nd expanded-beat period. A psychological landscape of December 2009, beats from the past emerge then disappear suddenly, erased.  "In Naples he walked among the high-rises of Park Shore at night, looking up at the stars, out at the horizon or up the coast at the jewel-like lights of Estero and Bonita in the distance. He'd walk past closed shops with fashion manikins in the windows" - 2015.
Art design (c) FugueXV, 2015.

David King - 'Horizon' - 3 AM/New Year's Eve

https://twitter.com/dkingIO    www.ideasoriginal.com
Years 2003-2015, done in 2016/late 3rd "autobiographical" period. "He created a 47-minute collage unifying 100 of his past pieces, paring them down to a 'central 50' with another 50 or so embedded...as close to autobiography as he had come up to that point. It takes listeners through the summer of 'Glorious Days', through artistic philosophies, gospel-blues battles with religion, jeweled night-worlds, psychological dystopias and an autopsy of a romantic relationship before arriving at new hope."  - 2016 
"The best introduction to King's audio work"
Art design (c) FugueXV, 2015.

Liner Notes/Commentary

David King - Montage I: Glorious Days

2016, between the Glorious Days Retrospective project and the 2016 early refractionism work.
https://twitter.com/dkingIO     www.ideasoriginal.com
"Periods of life never really die, the present is simply suspended over the past." The first track to premiere after the 12-year retrospective, possibly the farewell to the fusion-related "expanded beat" idiom. "2016 has had two faces - it has given me unexpected closure and new beginnings. Now my life can move forward."
The track itself features King's signatures on full display: twisted string, synth and bass lines, sections and motifs in metamorphosis, lavish, summery harmonies, and background detail of self-made samples.
Art design (c) FugueXV, 2016.

David King - Suspension

Music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MAHfU8xB30
2016. "A time-traveling panorama: wordless vocals over superimposed genres and layers of doubletime, time, and half-time. The initial energy degenerates into darkness then emerges with a melancholy piano solo and a triumphant finale. "
https://twitter.com/dkingIO     www.ideasoriginal.com
Art design (c) FugueXV, 2016.

David King - Exmemory

DAVID KING x MONTAGE II: 'MAKE THEM FREE': A shape-shifting instrumental panorama born of protest and solitude: King's "Glorious Days" of Montage I are gone, we must confront evil, and through this work we bear witness. Extraordinarily intertwined themes unflinchingly show animals in the slaughterhouse ending in memorial and imagined utopia, against brief flashbacks to endless summers and still nights of Montage I's biographical story. A truly developed symphonic work in modern idioms.

It begins with "Seeing Things", which symbolizes the realization that the prospect of a resurrection of a personal "glorious days" is over until I confront "the evil" I've seen in the world. 
2:07: A short transition in the style of Nottz.
2:21: A continuation of the transition with some jazz guitar work. 2:48 reverts to the summery style of Montage I's first part, the childhood utopia of "Glorious Days", representing escapism after the purpose of "Seeing Things". I'm happy at the Hendrix textures I achieved here. The "endless horizons" aren't to be: the sun is absorbed into an expansive night sky (3:20), and in a pensive moment of tension, the bass oscillates and the individual is alone facing the existential reality of the world. 
3:49: ExMemory bursts in, as either a symbol of forward progress or a symbol of man's industriousness, "action in the world". 
7:00 is the Flume-esque track Midnight (Part 1), a reversion back into solitude, but now more percussive and machine-like.
9:37 is the beginning of the first big transition passage: the new transitions are composed of equal parts of the previous and upcoming main episodes, making everything truly interwoven in the classical "developing variation" tradition. 
11:20: ExMemory recurs with driving force. 
12:25: Transition and the beat "Black Rain" - a nocturne. 
13:31: Protest begins in earnest, the individual confronts the world, to "Make Them Free" (in this case, the animals!).
14:16: "Death Cult" transition, the curtain pulls back on the subject of the protest, the animal agriculture system, here a slaughterhouse. The beat is razor sharp, its choppy loops rip flesh and the percussion overlays physical blows. It is brutal and in some ways is a cliche of the "banger"/"battle" beat that represents masculine aggression and ignorance. The sounds of misery and fear build, ending with the killing of the animal and silence, then a meditation on evil, and a moment where the soul ascends (17:49).
18:19: Another nocturnal passage, like sharp knives against silence. 
18:46: "Midnight II", a chop of "Midnight Pt. 1", more machinelike and brutal, yet macabre. 
20:25: It ends with hope emerging out of night, as a constructive vision of the future emerges. Glorious Days are again possible. 
The epilogue is real audio of pigs in a slaughterhouse. The brief utopia of the finale is just a fleeting vision, as this is still the reality.

Montage II

David King - Montage II

MONTAGE II: NOW    + MONTAGE I
Contact for composition, production, speaking engagements, interviews: ideasoriginalmusic@gmail.com. "Beats expanded and transfigured". Composer, music theorist and producer David King: Now, developing "refractionism", layering traits of his beat-work, theoretical New Style, and his autobiographical music. 
'Lifetime' Projects: NS 'New Style' (2010-)+ Rendered Form (2014-), Ideas Original music theory collection (2007-)

David King

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