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About The Album
I grew up in Singapore, a British-colonized and largely Chinese-settled modern financial powerhouse built on razed equatorial rainforest. It emanates an inescapable grief that I found impossible to escape as a child, and it follows me still, though I live halfway across the world in Maine. I find nature healing and wished to use this as an opportunity to connect the world I know, that of music, with the world I wish to live in - one where I can simply experience the mundane and ancient snapshots of life that human beings have enjoyed for thousands of years, before all of... this. This album is a collection of 10 instrumental tracks that aim to explore aspects of the natural world in evocative and succinct musical vignettes. The language is orchestral for the most part, though some unexpected visitors such as synthesizers, hammond organ, and alto saxophone, make an appearance. I am not a purist when it comes to technology, but I do believe that artists should try to venerate the physical labor and decision-making process of their craft, and so there are certain lines I will not cross. These lines are known to me. Most of the instruments you hear are completely electronic in nature, which allows me to independently control a large number of their properties - vibrato, vibrato speed, attack, release, expression, bow position, the amount of breath that is heard, the amount of rosin there is on a bow, etc. Every single one of these is physically performed, by me, with a combination of manually played keyboard, faders, knobs, and modified breath controller - a process not unlike playing on a traditional hardware synthesizer. The images in the grid have been created entirely from the final waveform of each of 10 tracks, curved into a perfect circle. Each track begins at the top of the circle, moving clockwise until it concludes in the same place. If you follow along, you may be able to perceive the dynamic contours and particular musical qualities of each track in the image. You can experience the music below, with videos created from a collage of various types of metering software output including waveforms, spectrograms, frequency curves, and oscilloscopes. Music today is typically experienced in a purely auditory form, over time, while art in a museum can usually be perceived in an instant, or at least, at a pace that the observer can independently determine for themselves. I wanted to have both - the experience of linear time as well as a crystallized instantaneous snapshot of the whole piece. After all, somewhere in the universe, someone might be observing our lower dimension in a similar way.
All tracks are wholly owned by me and available for licensing or creative partnerships on any medium.
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Mountain Breeze
The sensation of bracing cold wind in the early morning atop a rocky mountain, with the sun casting a gentle light as you breathe deeply of its life-giving air. Inspired by visits to Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park.
This piece features alto saxophone accompanied by a sometimes densely voiced, always delicately articulated string section, supported by a subtle, expressive hammond organ harmonies. Emotional french horn builds are punctuated with sparing celesta, glockenspiel, and piano drenched in reverb.
Harvest Festival
The joy of seeing months of hard work bear fruit in the garden one has lovingly tended, a connection between human beings, the soil, and the sun. Inspired by our tiny garden in the front yard where we once grew far too many cucumbers than we could use.
This piece began as a work for solo cello, and it was satisfactory, but lacked the collaborative spirit of a conversation with the Earth. So added a harp to complete it, adding the bustle of activity and a little bit of magic, because there is magic in the traditions we have had for thousands of years as an agrarian civilization
Gossamer Flight
A butterfly is fragile creature, and yet, its metamorphosis is often use as a metaphor for the power of transformation. I used this piece as an opportunity to combine those two qualities and explore the strength of gossamer wings taking flight.
The core of this piece is a pair of clarinets sharing fast dovetailed lines, doubled with the sheen of a harp. The string section weaves in and out, while an arpeggiated synthesizer supports the texture with morphing filters and releases. A tape-saturated brass section brings a cinematic quality to climactic moments.
Mating Season
The males of many species fight for the privilege of mating access to females. This has often been mirrored in human behavior, though today, such bloodsport is often an exercise in earning the approval of other males, making money, or personal development.
The piece is led by a soloist on octobans supporting itself with swung 16ths on one hand, inspired by Dhol technique, while the other hand plays contrasting rhythmic figures. A Brazilian samba triangle and Afro-Cuban cascara rhythm provide contrast and a build toward the end.
Glass Glacier
Ice, like glass, is an acoustically reflective material that allows sound bouncing off of it to maintain its high frequency content. This is likely to be why most people associate the sound of frozen environments to be sparkly and bright.
The featured instrument is the crotales, with plenty of space left around it in the instrumentation to accommodate the transparent sheen of long reverberations. The composition is spacious, with short punctuated statements designed to highlight the physical properties of an endlessly echoing chamber.
The Abyssal Plain
The abyssal plain is a vast portion of the ocean floor lying between 10 to 20 thousand feet beneath its surface. It covers 50% of the earth's surface, and is itself saturated in perpetual darkness. The wreck of the Titanic lies in this zone, which can reach pressures of 11000 pounds per square inch - an inadvisable vacation spot.
I used the full weight of the orchestra in extremely dense voicings and tense tremolo articulations in swelling waves to illustrate the awesome forces of gravity at work in this zone of our planet, which we understand less than the surface of the moon.
Long Summer Days
In the northern hemisphere, summer means long days, and in some cases, what the great Swedish poet Zara Larsson describes as "never ending midnight sun". The enveloping humid heat stretches out the natural rhythms of our lives into long, languid days where we tread a fine line between wakefulness and sleep.
This piece contains long, repetitive lines and soft articulations, played with no hurry at all. A cello introduces the alto saxophone solo, played simply over gentle piano accompaniment, which ends with a merciful light breeze from the strings and winds.
Traversing The Gorge
The world is full of awesome geological structures formed over millennia, and the slot canyons of Utah, formed by millions of years of erosion, are no exception. Deep narrow gashes in the earth sometimes thousands of feet deep, these are as treacherous as they are beautiful.
This piece is largely built on octatonic harmony to convey a sense of mystery and ancient wonder, with moments of timbral brightness where sunlight shines through narrow cracks to illuminate dark, sandy, old, and dry caverns.
Winter Pines
Snow covered pine forests are make for a lonely and desolate landscape. There is little to eat, and the task of staying alive is arduous. One must be resourceful and intelligent, and have the will to survive long enough to make it to Spring in the hope of better days.
Few instruments convey cold better than those of Scandinavian nations, and so this piece features a Nyckelharpa playing long, mournful melodies over droning cello section completely absent of vibrato, followed by the hollow sound of an alto flute.
Forest Rain
Spring brings with it rain, and with rain comes life. Immediately after a torrential downpour in a forest, mushrooms of all kinds begin materializing, seemingly magically, and out of nowhere, though of course we now know that they are simply the tip of the mycelial iceberg that lies underneath the forest floor.
This piece features lots of pitched percussion, with the marimba at the forefront of much of it, conjuring the image of drops of rain bouncing off of leaves and mushroom caps, with warm and optimistic brass denoting the hope of new life.