Last Friday [05.01.18], a few folks might have seen that I posted/twittered/facebooked-out something called MATTERS OF MATTER. A strategic move on my part, given I'd failed to previously introduce what the project was, or more precisely, is. Oops...
It's quite simple really:
MATTERS OF MATTER is new and an ongoing series of 52 pieces for 2018, composed and released during each week of the year. The pieces are written to explore, exhibit or sonify the emergent natural behaviours of various physical materials (and/or/as instruments made from those materials). A new score will be composed and posted here every week.
Certain components of MATTERS OF MATTER are being written for various pre-existent collaborators, others are open to all. Components of the series may be performed independently or as part of a set, selected from the whole. If you are interested in realising a component of MATTERS OF MATTER, do please get in touch via the contact page.
I suppose "WHY?" seems like a prudent follow-up question (if suitably capitalised).
Well, like all good things, the answer is at least twofold...
Firstly, I'm increasingly interested in the patternistic/behavioural sounds that emerge from non-sentient things. Wind-chimes, wind-through-leaves, creaking floorboards, irregularly dripping taps, the sluggish glissandi of a detuned D-string - those kind of things. I've spoken about this kind of stuff elsewhere before. So, on the one hand MATTERS OF MATTER is a kind of open sketchpad for my thinking/research/experiments in this area. A place to find and document non-sentient (sonic) behaviours that interest me - and hopefully you too.
The second bit is a bit more personal. For quite a while now, I've wanted to incorporate a greater sense of play into my music and, perhaps more crucially, my processes of making. That's for a variety of reasons, most of which really are a little too personal to delve into just here (maybe later). Especially in recent years, I have come found composing extraordinarily painful. And I think it was about time that is was fun again.
That said, I'm well aware that I've always been drawn to music that was rigorous and thorough and single-minded - I think I always will be . It's certainly a trait that I've always tried to take into my own work. I do not want to loose that. But I suppose what I'm trying to do is find ways of executing that same rigours thinking both efficiently and expressively but in a manner that isn't like pulling teeth every single day. And MATTERS OF MATTER, where I'm forced to make something new every week, is a place to explore and reconcile that.
Maybe "WHAT CAN I EXPECT?" might be another useful question to ask.
Each week, I shall upload a new piece in the series. Other than that, I make no promises.
I make no secret that this project is as much about forcing myself to regularly make and play as it is about anything else. What might emerge are a series of sketches, doodles, daydreams, thought-experiments, ideas for further development, self-contained pieces, installations, miniatures (the list goes on...) - we shall see what happens together.
Some of the pieces will be timed to feed into larger-scale commissions or projects, other's will just be for me. Either way, nobody will have exclusivity on these things, so if you're interested in performing/creating/executing one of them as/when it emerges, do please get in touch via the contacts page here.
I'll try to document as many as I can audiovisually along the way (although I suspect that process will be in quite a loose canon with the first!). Enjoy.
(And Happy New Year!)
Matthew