Published on Feb 17, 2014 Peter Grenader·23 videos
"From the album Secret Life, available on iTunes or CD Baby through Coda Recordings (link below).
Je Suis Anonyme (I Am Anonymous) is an A-B-Aprime-Coda arranged as a canon in both a micro and macro sense, meaning the construction of each gesture and the relation of one gesture to another. The process parallels elasticity and soft focus - stretching phrases to maximum duration while keeping elements loosely synced. The entry phrase was recorded in the late Summer of 2009. The work was completed during a three week period in September of 2010. It is distantly familiar to a work I did many years ago entitled "The St. Mathew's Passion, Part 2" (a lot of nerve there)!.
I approached Je Suis Anonyme with a rather empty conceptual pallet. This was by intention. Instead I relied more on noesis, something I became aware of while an art director where the distinct impression was that much of the creation was coming from the unconscious. Allow the piece uncover itself, continue until it tells you it's completed. In print art this manifests as carving an image out of a blank white page. In sound art that relates to silence and attested to synesthesia [1] - the visualization of colors, in this instance cobalt blue hues. Eastern culture defines this as Svadhisthana or The Sacral Chakra. There are other accounts of this phenomena in relation to music by Bela Bartok, Pierre Henry, Oliver Messiaen, Hanspeter Kyburz, Judy Collins and Robert Fripp [2].
JSA didn't begin as a dedication though through it's process it became evident it was a release of sorts to my mother, Harriet Avra Grenader. A final goodbye - something that's been long brewing. By sheer coincidence it was completed in the late evening on September 12th, the eve of her birthday.
TECHNICAL NOTES:
Most of the timbres in JSA were built utilizing source material recorded from the Plan B Model 30 Digital VCO Subsystem prototype in the Spring of 2009. Additional base reinforcement was added using a standard Plan B Model 15 VCO.
While the motifs in JSA may appear to have been generated in a single pass, they are actually the result of many layers of soundfiles. While the melodic progressions were scored utilizing a polyphonic instrument as a reference, governed by the monophonic attributes of the Model 30 the translation of this information involved multitracking. In instances where the required tonal information was not available in the original source material, Amazing Slow Downer was incorporated to generate those frequencies.
REFERENCE:
[2] Robert Fripp - 'Creativity: Finding The Source' (quote used through permission of the author): "Most musicians have experienced those moments of inspiration when magic seems to flow, when every note seems effortlessly right - but such moments are rare and their fleeting existence seems governed by capricious forces beyond our control. Is there any way to bring us into more consistent and productive contact with our Muse?
[1] Color Synesthesia: a phenomena in which voice, music, or assorted environmental sounds can trigger color manifestations which fade when the sound stimulus ends [3]. Until recently, synesthesia was believed to be rather uncommon, effecting only 1 out of 2000 individuals. Later studies indicate this percentage more towards 100 out of 2000 individuals and in some cases paralled to psychic perception in those tested. Although perception is often personalized (composers Liszt and Rimsky-Korsakov famously disagreed on the colors of music keys) sonic variation often affect the perceived hue, brightness, scintillation, and directional movement. In relation to amplitude: loud tones appear brighter than softer tones; in relation to frequency: lower tones are darker than higher tones; in relaiton to timbre: complex timbres appear brighter than purer tones. For some, the stimulus type is limited (music only, or even just a specific musical key); for others, a wide variety of sounds triggers synesthesia.
[3] Cytowic, Richard E; Eagelman, David M (2009). Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia (with an afterword by Dmitri Nabokov). Cambridge: MIT Press. pp. 309. ISBN 0-262-01279-9.
PERFORMANCE NOTES:
Je Suis Anonyme received its world premier at the Los Angeles Sonic Odyssey in Pasadena CA in November 2013
Available as a high resolution FLAC download on CD Baby at:
https://www.cdbaby.com/cd/petergrenader"
