This record is a balancing act: clear melodies and surprising harmonies, twisting words and ringing strums, wiggly synths and acoustic drums. Growing up with a guitar by my side, the instrument became a gateway for music to flow into and out of me. Guitar taught me how to hear, collapsing everything, from folk songs to symphonies, into something I can hold in my head and my hands. It’s also the easiest way for my imagination to talk. I can listen to a song, learn it on guitar, mix the musical moments that scratched at something in me with the sound my radiator makes, or maybe the way it feels to sit by the lake, and then let it all flow back out through the amplifier. This project is a tribute to that practice: noticing a moment, a feeling, a note, a phrase, stitching it together with what I’ve noticed before, and making something that’s both bigger and smaller than its parts. Coming to songwriting as a jazz musician, I’m deeply inspired by the experimental, instrument-centric spirit of great 60s and 70s albums like Pet Sounds and Hejira – non-jazz records made by jazz instrumentalists. I try to bring that spirit to my music through a two-step approach to playfulness. First, I play with musical choices on instruments – muting guitar strings with a small strip of paper, rolling the volume knob to create strange swells, making wobbly sounds on my synthesizer, bringing in friends on drums and occasionally bass or saxophone to infuse a song with collaborative energy. Then in the production process I play even more, chopping up fragments of music, hearing how pieces sound backwards or slowed down, using reverb and delay to create new textural layers that can shift in service of the story a song tells. If I filled a whole song with only the unusual, though, it would be impossible to notice details. It’s important to me to set my listeners up with just the right amount of familiarity, often through singable melodies, to open them up to these new sounds. I want listeners to feel both held and pushed; I hope these songs tug at the edges of the sounds you’re used to hearing.
Orchestra, Deconstructed is an interactive music exhibit featuring the works of living female composers. This exhibit is created by rehearsing with a full orchestra, and then recording musicians 1 by 1 and putting the recordings back together in a physical space, allowing audience participants to walk through this space and call upon the specific part in which the musician would have normally been playing. Creating a “deconstruction” of the traditional orchestra. This way, depending on how many people are walking through the space and how they’re interacting with the space, the exhibit will always sound different, and audience members get the experience of feeling like they’re a musician in the orchestra.
Polsky, Maya Y.,
"Mile of String"
(2022).
Music Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/8yne-6t49
