MUSIC FOR PODCAST: “THE FIGURE YOU SEE OUT THERE…”

“The Figure You See Out There Is Not Yourself” is Track 7 on my recent “Soundtracks Vol. 1” collection. It was originally composed for the “Impossible Performances” podcast, a collaboration between myself and Skewed VisionsCharles Campbell.

Voiced by Katie Hae Leo, this episode of “Impossible Performances” opens with the lines “You are alone, holding onto a thick strap with both hands, arms raised above your head. You look up in the dim, pink lighting. You are hanging from this strap that is looped over a projection the width of a diving board, extending out into the vast pink dimness of a thousand—a million—tiny lights, row after row in the ceiling, in the walls, 50 feet away, extending as far as you can see in all directions.”

I imagined a score that would encompass the grotto of pink lights, as well as the fragmentation of perception suggested by the text. In recent years I’ve been interested in creating ambient music that’s not as reliant on drones, that has more of a physicality to it, a plasticity, less of an ethereal experience and more a sense of shifting shapes. To achieve that sense here I developed a set of simple melodic phrases that harmonized on occasion. I then employed the technique of breaking the audio up into many pieces and reassembling them in various ways, kind of like shattering a stained glass window and putting the pieces back together as a collage. I did add reverb and delay here and there, and I pitch shifted the notes up and down an octave or three. But the emphasis was on the sense of fragmentation, and the spaces (even tiny ones) activated between notes.

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