My friend Guy Birkin, who did the art for “This Is My Horn, Vol. 1” and will continue hopefully with the future volumes wrote up a post explaining his process for the art. I’ve long admired his visual art, music, and writing, so I’m grateful for his contribution all around. Read his post here:
Category: releases
22.12.05 – this is my horn, vol. 1 out now
Hi all, pleased to share this first release in a series I hope to periodically revisit called “This Is My Horn”. Cover and info below. I’ve also amended some of my approach and all releases are freely available on the Releases page. I will, for now, continue to post them on Bandcamp as well. Thanks to my friends who helped and are credited below.
Connor Bell – sound
Guy Birkin – art
Josh Mason – text layout
Billy Gomberg – words
Most musicians have a passion for listening that matches their passion for playing. Tracing the influences and reflections that end up on a single recording can be a messy task if we commit to real geography of the phenomenon, instead of the poetic, abstracted interpretation we end up listening to and weaving into our own archives.
Connor Bell has been practicing and playing and releasing music for a while (as Shedding and in various bands), and on TIMH he connects his own listener’s passion and musician’s commitment into process and product. Working from his love of solo jazz recordings, Connor approached a design of his synthesizer as something capable of gestures that move through texture and a free sense of melody. An instrument he can play, a language we hear and start to understand.
Leaning back into a wistful bearing on easy tempo solos, Connor’s performance finds overlays of timbre like mutated multiphonics, resisting calm while gathering a soft neon glow as edges appear, suddenly bristling or momentarily melancholy. Given his intention, Connor’s solos hold an inviting space to a listener – robust and skilled, this is deceptively complex music keeping a room warm for you.
all ‘press’ here
hi, i guess at some point i made pages for the press on a couple releases, but that seems sort of tedious. so i’m just sharing a google drive folder with any and all press that i’ve managed to accumulate – that i know of – from the last 20 odd years. view the drive folder here.
more news soon on hopefully a new release and a few shows in the midwest this fall.
flocking 19 review from underhill lounge
grateful anytime someone listens, let alone shares their thoughts. but apparently this review surfaced yesterday. thanks to underhill lounge for the thoughts. i suppose i need to dig into some steve lacy now. review below:
“I’ve recently been interested in building layers of intentional chaos and exploring perceptions of order and the natural human tendency to seek and find patterns within that sound. There is a deliberate contrast between the controlled chaos simulating the natural world and the synthetic sounds I’m working with.“
Two longer pieces and 4 shorter pieces.
Names of the pieces use words in combination with three primary words, Flock, Flap, and Chirp.
Sounds seem primarily programmatically generated or manipulated. While it says below that these were recorded during a “sampler performance”, the sounds themselves seldom sound as if they were drawn from the natural world, except in the most abstract sense.
With the quote from their website which opens this writeup, it is hard to know how many of the event streams are simply set in motion and how many of them might be manipulated during their progress.
In general, what order which is expressed in the pieces is more like the order of nature sounds than the order of music. I.e., in general, there is no apparent tempo in most pieces relating the divergent sounds to the other sounds. When tempo does develop in events, as in track 4, “FLOCK1_MILCHI”, the tempos of the different event streams converge, but don’t affect the tempo of other event streams.
As if, in an algorithmic forest, we are listening to the sounds of algorithmic wind ticking through algorithmic branches as algorithmic creatures frolicking in that artificial world, all to the tempo or progress along the events of their algorithmic day.
On the other hand, while synthetic, it is not particularly harsh or dissonant, and somehow a pleasant feeling of lightness or almost whimsy is present in most pieces.
As an exercise, I recommend you listen to “Chirps” by Steve Lacy and Evan Parker, before, during, or after listening to Flocking 19 by Shedding.
“Assembled from July 2019 sampler performances in Milwaukee (Jazz Gallery) and Chicago (Elastic Arts)”