Light and Get Away

Letter from Tangiers

2012-02-03T18:41:00.004-05:00

Text from a 1955 letter by William Burroughs to Allen Ginsberg.

Sail when the wind allows

2011-12-29T22:17:00.001-05:00

Etude in A

2011-08-22T14:18:00.000-04:00

By Tim Risher and Tom DePlonty.

Stillness reviewed by Oliver Arditi

2011-08-18T22:29:00.001-04:00

A favorable, and very thoughtful, review of Stillness in the Mirror by Oliver Arditi.

Arrow

2011-08-17T11:27:00.005-04:00

This piece uses samples from the OLPC Sound Samples v.2, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

The samples are:

River sound, aluminum strikes, metal bowl strikes, bell spin, stopwatch, anklung: from the Berklee College of Music Sampling Archive, recorded, compiled, and edited by Richard Boulanger, Michael Brigida, Diane Douglas, Colman O'Reilly, and others.

Plastic jug strikes and swung hose: Richard Boulanger.

"Bended bells": Adam Keshen.

Kempura: Akito Van Troyer.

California night sounds: Andrew Sorkin.

Stillness reviewed on Chain D.L.K.

2011-08-09T14:34:00.004-04:00

Stillness in the Mirror comes up with four stars and poetry, here.

Ballade 1

2011-07-16T22:51:00.002-04:00

Looking Back

2011-07-01T13:11:00.003-04:00

Looking Back is Auraltone Music's anniversary release, including new and previously-released music:

1. Travel Trip - Nu2 11:12
2. Tom DePlonty - Spell 03:48
3. Dentist - Freezer 08:02
4. Tim Risher - If suddenly you forget me 05:20
5. etokle - Het mechanische gebied van de slaap 09:00
6. Tim Risher / Claus Gahrn - Night Flash: 8 pm 07:00
7. Cometa - Nakedness III 05:34
8. Tim Risher / Claus Gahrn - Autumn Atmosphere 05:47
9. Paragaté - Liquid Siftings 07:49
10. Ambient Fabric - Sphere 2 04

Just $6.00 at Bandcamp for a limited time. Check it out!

Corridor reviewed on Chain D.L.K.

2011-05-28T11:05:00.002-04:00

A nice review from Chain D.L.K., here.

Stillness in the Mirror

2011-05-27T19:41:00.006-04:00

Announcing the new Paragaté album Stillness in the Mirror, released today by Auraltone Music. The album contains music by Tim Risher, Tom DePlonty, and Claus Gahrn, and is available for purchase at Bandcamp in a variety of download formats, and as a CD.

Tafelmusik

2011-04-28T12:58:00.007-04:00

By Tim Risher and Tom DePlonty. Available on the album Stillness in the Mirror.

Summoning

2011-04-17T00:05:00.001-04:00

Spell

2011-04-07T00:21:00.002-04:00

Dreaming

2011-03-28T15:15:00.005-04:00

By Tim Risher and Tom DePlonty. Available on the album Stillness in the Mirror.

Plenum

2011-02-15T00:25:00.000-05:00

Concern with Language

2011-02-14T20:20:00.007-05:00

By Tim Risher and Tom DePlonty. Words by Charles Alexander, from "Near or Random Acts 2". Available on the album Stillness in the Mirror.

Corridor reviewed on Hypnagogue

2011-02-06T17:45:00.001-05:00

I'm proud to share this very warm review from Hypnagogue.

Lord of stones

2011-01-28T21:53:00.005-05:00

A handmade thing for Jeanette LeBlanc.

Full track from the album Stillness in the Mirror.

The dire anvils

2011-01-06T00:41:00.003-05:00

The beguiling pleasures of theft

2010-12-21T14:29:00.019-05:00

Tim Risher plans to release an album of collaborations early next year, and a couple of these will be with me - Still Morning is one we've completed, and we're working on another right now.

So he recently sent me a WAV - we usually start by tossing back and forth raw material for a while - and asked me if I could recognize the source:

I didn't, and I think he enjoyed telling me it was a warped fragment from my own piece "Corridor".

It's appropriate that Tim should be recycling it, because "Corridor" is itself based on a musical idea I stole from him:

Tim has used similar figures - along with a variety of tricks based on expanding, contracting, or abruptly changing the figure length, which I also cheerfully appropriated - in the piano parts of a number of his pieces.

After we finish the current collaboration, I'll have to figure out something else to steal from that for a new piece of mine. It would be a lot of fun for this to work out to a nice, long, unbroken chain of mutual robbery.

Hypnagogue podcast

2010-12-16T23:08:00.002-05:00

"The cup of wands", from Corridor, is one of the tracks featured on Hypnagogue Podcast #43.

If you're interested in ambient and electronic music, the podcast, and the companion review site Hypnagogue, are well worth checking out.

A brief excursus on addition

2010-12-01T23:55:00.004-05:00

Still Morning

2010-11-26T13:58:00.011-05:00

By Tim Risher and Tom DePlonty. Full track from the album Stillness in the Mirror.

Corridor released on CDBaby

2010-11-21T13:54:00.000-05:00

Corridor has been released by Auraltone Music, and is now available on CDBaby.

The blurb

2010-11-19T11:37:00.004-05:00

When I started this blog, I had to decide whether to write about the music I was posting. In the end I decided against it. My rationale was that writing about music (intelligently) is very hard, and so it would be time-consuming. Because time to write the music in the first place was hard enough to come by, writing words too would be counterproductive.

I also figured I wouldn't get away with it forever, and sure enough, Auraltone asked for a blurb about Corridor, which I hope will be available on CDBaby within the next few days. This is the first draft. It is necessarily short, and I hope it's coherent.

---

The music on Corridor, which was written between 2009 and 2010, combines material composed using musical processes and games - different ways of building up, breaking down, transforming and juxtaposing patterns - with improvised passages. Sometimes improvisation is used for raw material. For example, "In rain and light" is composed by looping and juxtaposing fragments drawn from one short passage in a piano improvisation. Other pieces are wholly or partially improvised, using a musical process or game for guidance, or as a foil.

These pieces are connected to a breadth of minimal and ambient music that I love, and sometimes also to the canons and melodies of children's music. Since I am a pianist, pianos (more or less warped) often appear as characters. And the music is generally very quiet. In fact, two of the tracks ("Sleeping monsters lie" and "Zen baby") are more or less lullabies - and those are the ones with the drums.

This album is dedicated to the memory of Marc Gaspard.

Zen baby

2010-11-03T00:48:00.007-04:00