Music written for an exhibition, accompanying works by Owen McAteer (aka Motus Art) at Un/framed (Pisa, Sept 2025). Image: Ashley Dace / Lights in the distance / CC BY-SA 2.0

Light across the field

Passage of a Smile is inspired by a work of the same name by the French Surrealist painter,
Yves Tanguy. I was struck by the unsettling familiarity of Tanguy's landscape, like staring
at a desert on an alien planet, or somewhere deep underwater. I wanted to evoke that
strangeness in a musical landscape.
This piece is built on a series of 'fake' harmonic spectrums, consisting of imposed intervalic
patterns (eg. 2 perfect fifths, 2 diminished fifths, 2 perfect fourths, 2 major thirds, etc.). These
spectrums come in and out of focus throughout the work.

Passage of a Smile

Wesley Shen, pianist 
At the Array Space in Toronto - June 2025

woolgathering, solo piano, Wesley Shen

Nerve (1990) is the first cassette album I had duplicated, with a run of 50 copies. It combined scrappy portastudio recordings made in my basement apartment with more polished tracks recorded with a mix of personal and professional equipment at York U. Not all of it holds up, student work or not, but some of my best early efforts were made here.

"Empire in Recline" is an instrumental mix of a song on Nerve. It fuses nu jazz funk and synth rock. The digital clav riff and gated drum sounds are of the period. No programming was used, all parts were played manually.

This track is a reconstruction of the original production using digitized stems from the 4-track cassette. I made several edits to the drum track to sync it to the unedited main keyboards; the tape and recorder were 20 years old at the time of digitizing and not reproducing the audio at a consistent speed. For the last minute, the drums and main keyboards are running together without any edit points. I have left in artifacts such as hiss, an audible punch-in on the drums, loose rhythm and keyboard flubs. There are no newly added effects or processing.

Composed and recorded November 1989
Yahama DX27 synth, Roland S-50 sampled drums, Tascam Porta One
Cassette 4-track stems transferred to digital 2009
Reconstruction in GarageBand, October 2025

Image: Nerve cassette J-card layout (detail), incorporating a photo by James McGuire

Music and composer’s notes copyright Bruce A. Russell 2025

Empire in Recline

somewhat burdensome (Chris Laurent Remix)

night one (Erik C Nelson Remix)

Loops of different lengths, cascading against/with each other.
Main loop quoting the "Rohan" theme, by Howard Shore.
Field recording from September 10th, 2025, at Hillside Park in Waterloo, Ontario.
Mixed in October, 2025.

Decomposing - (Cedarwood Sounds)

Becoming Sensor or a Planthropocene pt. III. Allison Cameron, Natasha Myers, Ayelen Liberona

Becoming Sensor pt. III. Allison Cameron, Natasha Myers, Ayelen Liberona

Corals Of Valais (1997) by Allison Cameron Eve Egoyan, solo piano

somewhat burdensome (Seavulf Remix)

Curious Hour Films

A recurring process with shifting sound sources and modest production.

And sometimes recordings of songs/improvisations by Anna.

Curious Hour Films

Matthew Fava

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