Album Notes

I was investigating the ergonomics of stringed instruments when I recorded these pieces. Almost all of them are fretless. I was thinking about how to use them as a section in the traditional orchestral sense rather than as part of a band. My intention (not abandoned) was to record groups of pieces for each family of instruments. These four pieces, with their ambient sonority (I was thinking about recording techniques involving microphone placement), grouped themselves (I postponed and eventually abandoned several other more aggressive and/or dissonant all-string pieces). “Bathtub Music” is a term I had used derogatively for many years as a live player, referring to the sort of music one listens to passively in the tub as opposed to the more active, physically engaging music one plays in a club. As with the pieces on 4/04 all the parts were recorded on the same day. Some of the instruments were built between tracks of the same piece.