“We would like you to create a response in music – a political or personal response, to your experience, the current state, or your thoughts for the future. An honest, human and emotive response for now and the future.”
Stone or log –
something that endues or something that does not?
Will I turn to rock or will I turn to rot?
It is often difficult for me to emote earnestly, especially in my music. Whenever I look inward, the most apparent thing I see is a primal fear of the fleeting nature of being alive. I see a mysterious countdown to lack of consciousness, to unalive. During these past few years of a global pandemic, this feeling has amplified in tandem with my efforts to numb it away.
In “Stone or Rot,” I musically marry this desire to be granitic – hard, unfeeling – with its supposed opposite, which is to be putrid: rotting, dying, turning to a cloud of mush. Repetitive, muscular gestures alternate with sounds more prone to decay. Once these unstable fragile harmonics and multiphonics speak, it is difficult for the original, grounded open string to be heard again – these little fragilities have minds and power of their own.
Like most ruminations on the current state and for the future, by the end, my thoughts turned to the sea
