Drawing I

Today's piece is a modest one. Fourteen notes in just under eight seconds. It's recorded to loop seamlessly when repeated, so it can run as long as the equipment (or listener) holds out.

Drawing I (0:08), basic loop.

Drawing I (02:23), looped with minor treatment.

I'd love to give a pretentious conceptual reason for the brevity or structure, but this one was just a product of chance.

I'd been knocking around the melody for a while, but I couldn't seem to get it to go anywhere. When that usually happens, I scribble it down and file it away for possible future use. This one wouldn't rest, though.

Then I saw one of Noelle Tan's photographs. It's vague and sparse, but somehow, it creates an illusion of buoyancy and motion in a static medium. Then it hit me: this melody doesn't have to go anywhere. I hooked up the Hazarai unit, and within a few minutes, I had it. Essentially, it's an exercise in reverberant stasis or frozen motion.

The whole thing was recorded on the bass. The piano tones are pinch harmonics run through a reversed delay. It's in A Major, but it doesn't have a real tonal center, so we'll call it D Lydian, since that's the implied axis.

The recording itself is open-ended, and it can be looped indefinitely. Funny thing is, you can't fill a CD with it, since 99 tracks (the maximum the format allows) only take up about 13 minutes. If you want to play with it, open it up in a DAW program and paste it on itself sequentially.

I've named it for Ms. Tan's photograph, since it inspired me to let this one go. I suppose that's the most earnest compliment I could give.