Desert Music is something that I wrote in November of 2014 for my colleague and friend Davis West's senior violin recital for us both to perform. I wanted to write a piece that showed both Davis' ability to improvise as well as my ability to use electronics and acoustic instruments in an organic way. At the time, I was incredibly interested in a genre of rock called Desert Rock, which uses space and effects which mimic what one may experience in a desert. I feel like the compositional style of Desert Rock sometimes makes the listener feel as though what they're listening to can't be real, somewhat like how humans may experience seeing mirages and other optical illusions while in a desert. This piece was trying to make the listener feel similarly, as though they were experiencing illusions. Desert Music uses a drum sample from a piece called Amen, Brother, written by The Winstons, yet it is slowed down nearly to half speed, making the listener feel that it may be their mind that is actually slowing down the sample, somewhat like an illusion. To create the wild electronic sounds of the violin, the violin's string pickup is fed into my computer, which is running a program called Ableton Live, where it is processed in real time, and is then is sent to the hall speakers, where the listeners hear it. This all happens within a fraction of a second, and continually changes throughout the piece.
This particular recording of the piece was done in one take and uses no post-production techniques.
This particular recording of the piece was done in one take and uses no post-production techniques.