Album Notes

Why is a successful visual artist presenting a music CD?
Believe me, you’re not the first to ask. One very good answer is- that it’s fun.
Next, maybe even better, is that I always wanted to do this.
Since I was a kid playing with electronics in our garage, making music for the ears, or music for the eyes- are all the same to me.

My approach to making sounds that fit together is much the same to me as painting.When I compose a work I am aware of the edges as much as the space in the middle.I am aware of silence and openness, and I am aware of sound as a graphic element that forms a boundary, or is a gesture. Gesture brings me to the Theremin. It is so simple, yet it takes a Tai Chi master to play it well. It takes a strong sense of pitch. (not perfect- nothing is perfect until it is dead.) This is all very intriguing to me.

The Theremin is an endless breath that defines a space by moving effortlessly through it. It is so much like a voice, be it in this world, or as an unknown voice in another. Deep in the ocean is a mysterious world that is just within reach. We have yet to really explore those depths. Beyond our thin protective atmosphere is truly limitless space that cannot support us as we now exist. We are creatures of gravity and breath, and we have to take our planet with us to explore there. The Theremin is suggestive of both these kinds of Otherspace.

My compositions are more informed by Classical composers. I grew up listening to European Baroque and Romantic composers when my friends were destroying their hearing and mental capacities with sensational acts like Led zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix. Never mind, I finally got around to them, too, but I listened to them finally from a “classical” perspective. World music and Generative music ala Brian Eno and Steve Reich, difficult contemporary composers like Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson, even Frank Zappa, and David Byrne are the kind of sounds, and people who make them that I really admire. They all have a good sense of humor.