Understanding the world through sound
Happy new year friends!
I'm getting really excited to share my next album, The Harmony of Rhythm, with you all this winter.
We're most likely looking at a February release, but I'll keep you posted.
In the mean time, I wanted to share some of the ideas that make this project tick. Working on this album has helped me understand some of my own interests and approaches to composition and improvisation in terms of how they relate to me as a person. All of this is an ongoing discovery, but it's cool when you work your way into realizations that make you feel like you might actually understand something of the greater significance of what you're doing.
The Cripistemology of Vibration: understanding the world through sound
I like to mess around with a lot of sounds and different instrumentations in my music. It' keeps things interesting for me, but I sometimes fear that I'm avoiding saying anything by hiding behind cool textures.
Over the past two years, which includes the development of The Harmony of Rhythm, I've changed my band's lineup more than ever. I largely do it to create the best possible music for the room I'm playing in. The desire to challenge myself as an improvisor also contributes, but more recently I found myself wanting to find a unifying principle in all this experimentation. Am I trying to develop a musical language? Am I searching for new sounds? Or am I just trying not to get bored?
As reticent as I am to squash the hollistic experience of music into heavy academic terminology, the Harmony of Rhythm album was conceived while I was being supported by a couple academic institutions, so some elements of scholarship have found their way into the project. I attribute most of my musical development to things I've learned by listening to recordings, performing with others, and gaining knowledge from life experience, but one major concept--the idea of Cripistemology--that I learned about during the residencies that made this album possible has served as a conceptual glue for me.
Cripistemology in its essence is the idea that disabled people such as myself develop original and highly personal ways of generating knowledge that help us understand and participate in the world around us. In the main stream, you have media, entertainment and longstanding social norms that people often rely upon to contextualize and / or try to change their life paths. The idea is that you see enough people around you similar to yourself that you're able to gather data that allows you to figure out stuff like "am I on the right path?", "Is this person / place / company a good fit for me?", or "Is this even safe?". When you're disabled, however, it's highly unlikely that following what worked for someone else will benefit you--especially if that someone else is able bodied or has a very different disability from yours. So for a start, the idea of cripistemology made me feel that, "Hey, maybe it's not only possible but also good that I think differently about music than others."
The journey towards situating my art in the idea of cripistemology made this realization very sweet indeed. I might be painting with broad strokes here, but before COVID I was very attached to the idea of dividing music into units. This is probably the most common way of understanding and consuming music. Whether you call it songs, compositions, pieces or numbers, it's typical to organize musical ideas in a way where each one has a distinct beginning and end. My pre-pandemic iteration of Calculated Discomfort was essentially a dance band that featured lots of improvisation, but still operated very much on the idea of the song and the relatively symetrical arcs songcraft implies. I wanted the music to be exploratory, but also still fit in somewhat with the rock bands, rappers and funk bands we were sharing stages with.
However, as I delved deep into solo improvisation and tons of listening to records during lock down, I began to realize truly how much I loved the simultaneously conversational and surprising elements of great improvised and experimental music. Don't get me wrong--I'm still always on the hunt for great concise songs with slamming arrangements--but as an artist myself I feel I have the most to say when it comes to responding to individual moments. Even if I'm playing top 40 covers I think my strength is being able to shape the music to the environment. I'm never going to try to play a song in a bar the same way I'd play it in a small seated theater--and I'll take a whole other approach if we're playing outdoors.
Based on the musical experiences that stuck with me most and having had the chance to think a lot about what I like as a listener, I found myself wanting to make more conversational music than ever, and much less wanting to package my work in a comercial way. If I had any doubts about wanting to take things farther out, an October bar show in 2021 where I couldn't find a bass player sealed the deal. Without conventional low end, the band had two horn players, two percussionists, a vocalist, and a couple keyboards the horn players could switch onto. We made some of the most exciting music in Calculated Discomfort history. It was still dancey, but the direction each improvisation took never felt obvious. This new sound world made my ears and brain thirsty for more, which brought me to the Bodies of Work Residency--the first residency that supported the development of The Harmony of Rhythm.
The Bodies of Work (BOW) residency supports working disabled artists in producing work and thinking about disability representation. My goal was to create new material for an album, and I was also tasked with addressing some sort of representational conundrum in the process. My main concern with that academic component was audience. I was trying to figure out should I be making are just for disabled people, or art about the disability experience for non disabled people, or if any of that even really mattered in the long run. I got a stipend to do some composing, money to complete a recording session, and it culminated with an awesome Calculated Discomfort concert at the University of Illinois at Chicago campus (some of the recordings of which are featured on the Harmony of Rhythm).
It was an honor to receive the recognition and helpful to get the cash, but I felt I only had documentation of works in progress and didn't have a clearer idea of what I was trying to make or who I was trying to make it for. Luckily for me, Dr. Carrie Sandall recommended me for a subsequent fellowship, which is where ideas and sounds fell into place for me.
At first I wasn't sure if the Crip Star fellowship was a good fit for me. The cohort had other artists, but seemed more focused on written work and academic archival material with the goal of synthesizing everyone's thoughts into a single final video project. However, applying the idea of cripistemology (the central conceptual focus of the fellowship) to my ideas of orchestration, improvisation and constant iteration ended up being the key to a new world for me.
I completed two assignments during the fellowship, and they're both featured on the Harmony of Rhythm. The first was to create a narrative description of a space you visit a lot. I chose a Hookah Lounge where I like to unwind and instead of writing a narrative, I recorded a piece at home. Using various percussion instruments I tried to depict the emotional essence of the hookah bar. Cymbals represent the smoke, chattering hand percussion emulates the sound of the several languages that casually waft throughout the space, and a gentle but steady pulse mark the hours that easily pass when you're sharing the hose with good company. Already this process started to break open some of the mental blockages I had about my band work. I started to realize that maybe I didn't want to make songs, but environments for peoples' minds and ears to explore. But the question rmained of how to do that while still creating music that has excitement, surprise and an arc--in other words--music that tells a story.
The second and final assignment got me to my answer. Tasked with describing what cripistemology means to us, I recorded a single-take drum improvisation and a spoken word layer titled The Cripistemology of Vibration .
I am blind, so I inherently experience the world through sound. Sound is vibration in the air. Music is organized sound, and therefore deals intimately with vibration. I use vibration to gather information about the world around me and make decisions every day.
When people speak, they vibrate the air around them. While there's no such thing as a trustworthy voice or a deceptive voice, the way people use their voices can give me that information. Even though I can't see people's faces, I can hear if they are talking directly to me or looking across the room , mind already moving to their next conversation based on the way they vibrate the air.
Similarly, places contain the collective vibrations of their inhabitants. The entrance to a CTA train station and the lobby of a doctor's office may be architecturally similar in many ways, but the vibrations that exist in each are very different. The train station has many different frequencies at once, where your office space is more one speed all around (making a deviation in frequency very noticeable indeed).
Regardless of if this makes sense or not, it's how I understand the world. And since music deals with vibration in a similar way, it's also how I develop musical relationships and compositional concepts. No matter who is experiencing my music, it's made from my disabled perspective, and that's going to make the foundation of the music exist in its own world, even if there are surface-level similarities to existing styles or genres.
The Harmony of Rhythm is a step deeper into this sound world of mine. The sounds are not organized in any way that is connected to a visual medium. This is a story for your mind, composed of various environments and textural orchestrations. I think it's thrilling--familiar sounds given new shape by an alternative perspective.
Experience the vibration live
As a direct offshoot of the residencies I mentioned above, I'll be presenting an experience at the Art Institute of Chicago this month. They're calling it a sound activation, but I'm thinking of it as a multi-room Calculated Discomfort show. Various band members are going to be set up in a couple galleries creating sounds that capture the emotional ideas of visual art. The ancient Chinese bronze isn't cool just because of it's color composition, but because of the feeling it inspires to stand next to. We'll be capturing that in two galleries and all coming together with a final set under a floating sculpture.