What’s happening around what’s happening.
Siavash Amini at Klappfon, 2018.
I learned a lot about composition while recording this album, most of which came about as a direct result of weekly Skype sessions with Siavash Amini. I had briefly worked with him previously—my collaborative project with Björn Granzow, Shovels Beat the Sun, was the first and unfortunately only release on his Bitrot imprint in 2015. I first met him in person at one of his shows in Switzerland courtesy of my new friend Remo Seeland, owner and curator of Hallow Ground.
It was a crazy night. I took the train from Zürich to Basel and arrived at Klappfon, a second-floor room in a dimly-lit, derelict barracks about 30 minutes before the start of the show. I sat on the floor, staring at the opening act’s broken-down drum kit, several funnels and pots, medical grade rubber tubing, half a plastic milk jug tenuously attached to a high-hat stand, and sighed. I guarantee the next 60 minutes were worse than you’re imagining right now. But Siavash’s set—a blur of heartache and bliss, fury and release—was magic. After breakdown we went to a bar around the corner, more akin to a speakeasy, where we imbibed too much whiskey amidst the too-young kids that packed the room. As we walked back towards the train station engrossed in conversation, I remember having to sternly rebuff an overly persistent sex-worker as Siavash wondered out loud about the location of his phone*. We were quite the pair dragging his rolling luggage over Basel’s cobblestoned Straße at 1:00 am.
Anyway.
One of the most important things I learned while making this record is this: listen to what’s happening around what’s happening. Much like visual stimuli, sounds have aural after-images that linger in your ears. They decay into silence, they blur into the sonic ephemera of rosin on strings, they color the next note in the phrase. Oftentimes the unintentional is the exceptional, and that interplay is more interesting than the notes themselves. Learning to inhabit the spaces in-between has arguably made me a better composer and listener.
*We’re both absolutely certain that the sound engineer made off with his phone that night. I must have called the missing phone’s number at least 20 times in the next week, until I finally reached the recording: Diese Nummer wurde abgeschaltet oder ist nicht mehr in Betrieb.
