Mercy Circuits
hello friends,
during the pandemic i've spent a lot of time thinking about mercy, the common good, what we owe each other, and the larger purpose of art, or at least of my art. i always prefer to explore these impulses with other people, with fellow artists and musicians on the bandstand, but isolation is not unknown to me. the terminus of the project for now releases today under the title ‘mercy circuits’, and i hope you’ll give it a listen.
every record is a step further along my path, and in this case it was firmly into the territory of electronic music, where i am a grateful, starry-eyed tourist. the physical logic of any instrument informs how we interact with it: harps and trombones for their slippery glissandi, guitars and fiddles for their open strings, etc. the synthetic tool-kit on offer to me (no offense to my analogue modular synth friends, i just don't have the money to pour down that particular well) also has a certain workflow and logic to it. it prefers consistency and grids, and copy/paste composition, made more 'human' by randomization. choosing when and how to embrace, push against, or fully break those tendencies is, of course, composition.
‘backup rainbow’ was a phrase that came to me reading Han Kang’s ‘the white book’. her prose has one of the things common to many great works: a balance of gravity and levity, of heaviness and lightness. i don’t know whether i achieved that here, but that was the goal. the opening arpeggiated triplets were written at a piano several weeks before, with no melody. it may have a bit of a cinematic feel, which i think in this case is an emergent property of the sounds and workflow, as i don’t usually seek that language. a more cynical person might have titled it ‘every netflix thriller (call me),’ but don’t worry i didn’t and wouldn’t do that.
‘circa happy’ is, if i remember correctly, titled after a technologically occasioned accident watching a video online of the masterful jazz drummer Eric Harland. the words were in the same sentence, but their connection was severed by the live streaming platform. the keyboard ostinato was again written at an acoustic instrument, with special attention paid to the separation and clarity of the layers—motor, melody, bass, colors.
‘mercy circuits’ was me trying to do several things at once: play guitar, use pitch shifted vocals, break the in-built looping mechanisms of my software, and most importantly think about mercy. i wrote the phrase down years ago after reading about the idea that self-driving cars will have to have algorithms in their code to determine how to save which lives, like a trolley problem—will it prioritize the driver, will it maximize number of saved lives, will it optimize for people it thinks are younger or more important, and to what extent will the biases of the programmer leak into these decisions? i am also reminded by this phrase that we can, and should, use policy to help guide us societally to make life less brutal for one another by practicing mercy.
i nearly walked away from music in the last 18 months. there were many anguished nights replaying various failures and missed opportunities, thinking about the future of music and art in our common culture, and trying to clearly imagine who i was without music. taking a cue from rilke’s famous ‘letters’ i asked myself, in a dark and quiet hour, whether i was truly a musician, committed to accepting the obligations of the answer…. ‘mercy circuits’ is my fourth release during the pandemic, the others being ‘life happens anyways,’ ‘haikullages’ with Emma August Welter, and ‘Bigger Smaller Nows’ with Chord Four.
thank you for joining me for this part of both of our journeys. i hope the music offers you space to wonder, or think, or feel, or dissociate on your way to work. please consider donating time or money to organizations trying to make the world better. also don’t do favors for companies.
https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org
https://movehumanityforward.com
https://www.incomemovement.org