colleen

When I started working on my 8th album in August 2021, I was freshly out of making my 7th album, The Tunnel and the Clearing, which I had finished a mere 8 months earlier. The pandemic and my decision to retire from live playing shortened the promotion cycle, so I went back to the studio, eager to start something new. I had a rough concept in mind, that of exploring the notion of “reality”, a theme I often thought about given how my life – like so many others – felt “taken over” by the digital realm.

At first I gravitated towards making songs that sounded a little like The Tunnel, still singing, using the Yamaha Reface-YC organ through the Grandmother, and the Elka Drummer One. But little by little – and you can see this if you have a look at my archived stories LP8-1 and LP8-2 – I became consumed by synthesis. I had so much to learn and explore that in spring 2022, I came to the conclusion that 1) I didn’t have enough hours in the day and intellectual energy to keep up the “level” on all of my instruments 2) the album was going to become thoroughly indigestible if I kept everything 3) synthesis was a much more subtle and efficient tool to explore the notion of different shades and dimensions of reality. So I made the drastic decision to reduce the setup to just the Moog Grandmother going into either the Moogerfooger MF-104M Analog Delay or the Roland RE-201 Space Echo. As always when I make drastic artistic decisions, it was a relief, and this tighter focus enabled me to finish the album a few months later.
The idea of the suites is loosely based on baroque and classical music, each movement having chords and motifs in common with the other movements, but using different synthesis settings, to explore this idea of “the same thing” (in this case, notes) *not* being the same thing (a different sonic embodiment). I will do a detailed video on the sounds of “Subterranean”, but I think the 3 movements give you a great idea of how this concept is materialized in the album.

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