Name: Release by Blimp Division
Duration: 2 min 28 s
Description: WARNING: Drop may break speakers or ears haha

Jamming out 3 ideas I have for songs on Sharif's sick guitar and pedals!
Always heard them something like this but until now have played them mostly on acoustic guitars so this feels like a real step up!
At some point Danny enters on drums on and Shraif on synths

Big Riffs Recorded With Sharif's Guitar Pedals

A study in b flat minor, in the style of french romantic film music.

Study in b flat minor.mp3

Feeling Funny - Beginning of a song - experimenting with piano vocals and effects.
With more time I plan to add bass, drums guitar and synth and make this into a full track - watch this space :)

Feelingfunny231009

Introducing Max Glass on the vacuum cleaner 
in the key of E!

accompaniment for vacuum cleaner.mp3

Experimenting with wave table synthesisers

WavetableExperiment

Performers: Steven Schick, conductor; Wilfrido Terrazas, flute; Ellen Hindson, oboe; Grace Talaski, clarinet; Kosuke Matsuda, percussion; Kyle Adam Blair, piano; Miguel Zazueta, Natalia Merlano Gomez, Alex Taylor, voice; Amir Norouz Nasseri, Ilana Waniuk, violins; Myra Hinrichs, viola; Peter Ko, cello; Matthew Henson, bass

Production assistance from Alex Stephenson, David Espiritu and Jessica Flores 

---

Stylistically, Interviews resembles a collage: materials borrowed from Josquin, spectralism, Leonard Cohen, high modernism, elevator music, the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Kyle Adam Blair, Appalachian folk singing, bits recycled from my own pieces, the recorded voice of my mother, my own songs and poems. But collage is generally creating something new out of things that come from different places, disparate things; this feels more like a multifarious reflection of my own musical and personal world – things that all come from, or at least have been absorbed into, the same place, a musical inheritance or accumulation. I’ve always felt slightly unsure of the relationship between all of the many aspects (personas?) of my music making – sometimes they feel far away from each other, held in different compartments – but here I feel I’ve found a way for many of them to coexist in one place.

Conceptually, I think of Interviews as more concerned with storytelling than with aesthetics. Or at least, Interviews represents an intersection between musical and personal concerns. In the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, I undertook ethnographic research as part of my PhD coursework. For this I interviewed both my parents, Vicki and Trish, asking them all kinds of questions about their lives: what it was like for them growing up, how they came to terms with their sexuality, what it was like living through the politically tumultuous 1980s in New Zealand, how they went about starting a family, how it was for them when I came out. 

At the time, this was a really rewarding process of discovery and documentation, a way to learn new things about my family and where I’d come from, a way to feel connected to them across the Pacific during the enforced separation of the pandemic. Now, those interview recordings have other resonances. Trish was diagnosed with early onset dementia several years before we made the interviews; by the time we recorded them, her dementia had started to really affect her short term memory. Now, nearly four years later, her dementia is quite advanced, and many of those memories are gone for her. Looking back, the documentation of those memories is precious. 

The making of this piece has been both a way for me to hold on to that preciousness, those past perfect moments of connection, but also a way to process grief, the ongoing present of loss and change. In many ways Interviews occupies a threshold, between looking back and looking forward; it is both at once, acknowledging the messiness and multifacetedness of memory, not singular, smooth, or linear. I also see it as a small way of showing gratitude for both of my devoted, supportive, sensitive, beloved parents, and of celebrating Trish’s life.

Interviews, for ensemble and prerecorded sound

Tits Out For Milli

Gutteral Sounds

251125 AirPusher808SYNTHPADCLICK

WARNING: Drop may break speakers or ears haha

Release

zeal with laughton

New track every week Sunday evening. Experimental music project.
Inspiration: John Cage, Radiohead, Nirvana, Tool, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Rage Against the Machine, Vampire Weekend, Simon and Garfunkel, Led Zeppelin, Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Bill Evans, Chick Corea, Keith Jarret, Chopin, Bach, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Venetian Snares, Amon Tobin, Tycho, Ratatat

Release

Blimp Division

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