After six weeks of planning, tomorrow morning I'm flying out to the Southeastern corner of Utah to spend a week making field recordings in the 1.35 million acres of wilderness that was previously known as Bears Ears National Monument.
Bears Ears National Monument was established by President Barack Obama on Dec 28, 2016. The monument's original size was 1,351,849 acres (roughly the size of Delaware), and was reduced 85% by President Donald Trump on December 4, 2017 in an exceptionally large acreage reduction that is unprecedented in the history of U.S. national monuments.
I've spent the past several years looking for a new way of creating, writing and producing music, one that works outside of traditional song forms, yet still has an underlying structure, self imposed limitations and is built upon substantive ideas that interest me. I've explored the works of field recordist Bernie Krause and composers John Luther Adams, Caroline Shaw, Steve Reich and Gavin Bryars as well as fellow Vermonter Nick Zammuto and Museum of Natural History data visual specialist Brian Foo. My idea for this project, is to go make field recordings of vanishing places, then take those recordings with me back to the studio to be manipulated and transformed into sampler instruments that might serve as the foundation for minimalist, stark and contemporary pieces of music, built using soundscapes from places that are in the process of changing and vanishing before our very eyes.
