Back To Ampersand Index PAGE 2 - Story - The genesis of Ampersand took place on a two week canoe trip in July of 2002 through Quetico Provincial Park of Ontario, Canada. I had brought a very cheap nylon string acoustic guitar along, something I usually don't do on vacations. During one evening, over the course of about 2 hours, I wrote all of the music for Crayfish, Soul Partition, November Frontlines, and a number of other pieces used for other projects. After returning, I recorded them as demos and tried to form a band to play some of these pieces, but was never able to find enough musicians interested in performing the music the way I heard it. Picture from Quetico, stolen from the internet... This is what almost all of Quetico and Boundary Waters looks like, although this shot is specifically very similar to the memory I have of what I saw for those two hours. In the spring of 2003, I started working with John Moulder and Paul Wertico on the album, StereoNucleosis, and I had to put Ampersand (which for four years held the arbitrary working title of "Project Infinite Wombat") on hold for 10 months. This entire album was made "in the cracks" of other projects, working whenever I could. This gave me a unique opportunity to hear it anew each time I would resume work after months of not hearing it. I would often have a new set of smaller ideas, or changes to implement on the entire album, but I would never be uninspired upon each return. While some musicians can promptly dress their musical ideas in spoken language, I find myself in the same quicksand of inarticulacy that I would if trying to describe a single brushstroke of a painting to a blind person. I did feel, however, that I could create something for the cover of the CD which appropriately embodied some of the main creative devices of this record. I feel as if the record exists sonically as two predominantly two-dimensional planes that are layered against each other to create a three dimensional space in which things occasionally can fall between. The top layer is the primary focal point where the most expressive and human material (the drums and guitar soloing) can be found, as well as the less abstract Minimoog melodies and bass solos. The second layer acts very much as a supporting layer. Chamberlin, analog synths, orchestral instruments, piano, and many indistinguishable sounds fuse together in this second area. While the focus is on the top layer, the bottom is largely obscured until an instrument on top loses its consistency, even if for only a second, and the bottom can be revealed momentarily in that window of opportunity. Due to the jagged guitar textures chosen for the top layer, I felt that many of those windows were created in the spirit of tearing a hole, rather than surgically cutting one. For those of you who do not know, I have a neurological condition known as essential tremor. Basically, my hands (and many other muscles in my body) shake, to the point of inhibiting almost all of their normal functions. I cannot eat thin soup with a spoon, hold a martini glass, or a number of other things requiring fine motor control or stable dexterity in my hands. The onset of the illness first struck around the year 2000. At first, through a combination of meditation, a glass of wine, and remaining somewhat detached from the emotional sentiment of a performance, I could manage playing guitar in a stress free recording environment, but before long, even that started to prove impossible. After setting the guitar aside for the entirity of 2003 and 2004, as well as resigning my personal identity as a "guitarist," I reapproached the instrument in late 2004 simply as a musician/artist who wanted to use a guitar to express themself. Not only did I want to find a way to make playing the guitar possible again, but I wanted to become much closer in spirit to what it was that I was going to be expressing. I wanted playing an instrument to mean something very different to me than it had before, and I feel that spirit (as well as the struggle to reach it) is embodied largely within the jagged guitar textures found on this record. The group of compositions I gathered to make this record were not exactly birds of a feather. They had all been started for reasons relating/pertaining to each in itself and making this record was largely a process of unifying unrelated compositions through instrumentation and arrangement. It was a long journey, but each track now feels like a part of this collection and inherently borrowing from the universal palette of the Ampersand album, both conceptually and sonically. Later into the development of the record, another artistic possibility arose which I decided to run with. In another analogy... If you cut off any part of a hologram diffraction grating (a recorded interference pattern of two light beams used to record a source image, which serves as the negative used to recreate a holograph), the two resulting pieces will both be able to recreate the same image, simply less defined than the original piece. This is because the entire image is stored in every part of the diffraction grating. Each track of Ampersand contains musical performances from at least two other tracks, and something from each track is used in at least two other tracks. While some elements were very easily taken out of their original habitats, the artistic gift of limitation facilitated some very interesting uses for others, all of which I will detail in the commentary for each track. The idea to do something like this was originally conceived while working on Paul's record, StereoNucleosis, when I realized that I could easily copy audio between project files. I decided to take a sound from each of the tunes to create a 4 or 5 second composition that would serve as the hidden track for the album. I suppose this unification through splicing and transplanting different tracks also strikes me as a sort of Yin Yang, making sense out of unrelated extremes found on the record. On most records, a lot of effort is spent taking out some of the excess human element, to put it nicely (i.e. fixing mistakes). Because the nature of this record was one in which the greater part of this lower layer was created with sampled or synthesized sounds, there was not an incredibly large amount of these human elements that needed fixing. I began to see this as one of the inherent qualities of the lower layer; not necessarily "in tune" or "in time" (as the samples often are not), but rather a concrete and human-less quality. Upon juxtaposing this with the contrasting top layer, I decided to leave the soloing and drums very raw, unaltered, and human. There is a lot of tension that is created when an instrument in the top layer begins to move in a certain direction of expressive inaccuracy (in pitch or time) while the other layer retains its consistency, as opposed to the possible breathing and flowing organism of an ensemble. I've implemented this same philosophy while playing bass in Paul Wertico Trio, existing as the element which remains stationary by continually playing the written ostinato figures for the pieces, and both Paul and our guitarist, John Moulder, have commented that it accents what they play very differently and more intensely than if I were to begin playing abstractly or "free" alongside them. I think of this as the difference between a painting of all expressive brush strokes countered by other brush strokes, and a painting of brushstrokes countered by concrete geometric shapes or grid lines. I don't think either way is better or "more correct" than the other, nor do I even like one more than the other as a general rule, but I did consciously choose to create Ampersand in one of those ways. A concept I've integrated into my life that has permeated into nearly every facet of this record is the concept of what I usually refer to as "analog" thoughts or ideas. (This has no correlation to the "analog" of analog recordings or equipment.) At some point in time, I realized that many people have a "digital" (meaning entirely one way or the other, the way that all digital technology, on a small enough level, operates entirely with 1s and 0s). tendency to categorize everything they come across into a predefined definition. This practice has caused much controversy in the world within the form of stereotyping, racial profiling, or when Obi Wan Kenobi says in Star Wars Episode III, "Only a Sith deals in absolutes." I assume this is the human brain's tendency of creating shortcuts in order to survive more efficiently... but efficiently is not necessarily better. I have tried to restrict this "digital" way of thinking in every aspect of my own life: in spirituality, morality, art, music, personality, identity... An "analog" way of thinking would involve allowance of "inbetweens" and indecision: indecision not based off of apathy, but simply as an acceptance of the possibility that not everything must exist as an absolute. The word art comes from the word "artifice," which means "subtle trickery." Art is about creating a falsity or illusion that uses abstract elements at some level (even possibly at the conceptual level, or metacognitive level in the case of newer forms of art) to induce something; an emotion, a thought, or a memory possibly. As part of this process, I think it's very important that each person relies on a mind free from the neccesity of stereotyping, otherwise the responses will become repeatable and boring. The classical composer, Edgar Varese, once said that music is just "organized sound." I believe this is the most legitimate definition of music that yet exists. Organization is merely a form of limitation, placing barriers and definitions into information, which is also the basic functionality of a genre: a list of restrictions and rules laid down by the lineage of artists within the history of that genre. In creating music that ended up having a home in no established genre, I basically tried to write my own limitations, even if arbitrary ones, to define my workspace as a managable and practical playing field for both myself and the listener. I tried to create a mix of old and new: things that were predictable and familiar alongside those that were surprising and alien. A huge part of the artistic vision itself, and the energy required to achieve that vision, went into the arrangement of these decisions. Those creative limitations, (such as palette, conceptual structure, narrative structure and devices, and arrangement choices), which are some of the things I consider the most vital in the process of making music, were all intentionally broken in at least one place on the record. One could also consider this similar to the practice shared by countless cultures of intentionally introducing flaws into their works of art. NEXT PAGE Back To Index