Welcome to Islands in the Stream. This album of experimental electronic music uses a variety of techniques and styles to create a concept album based on impressions of a stream. The pristine, audiophile sound quality and beautiful cover art combine with the music to create a wholly artistic and satisfying package.
Islands in the Stream covers a range of contemporary classical musical styles and techniques, focusing primarily on sounds generated by modular, analog, patch-panel synthesizers, as well as the musique concrete manipulations made possible by digital sampling. The rich warmth of older analog equipment is contrasted and balanced by crisp digital timbres, creating a sound that spans the history of electronic music from the early sixties to the present day. Great care and attention have been directed to the sounds themselves, which range from the sharp and percussive blasts of 'Prelude' to the ethereal, hypnotic waves of 'The Stream (10 Feet from the Shore)'.
Reviews
ProFile Column, Electronic Musician, November 1995
Stream of Consciousness
Nick Peck's electronic island cruise.
By Mary Cosola
Some things you have to learn the hard way. Just the other day, I learned that I should never listen to experimental electronic compositions with one of my 20-pound cats sitting on my lap. On the whole, cats don't take loud surprises very well. A couple of subtle bleeps and bloops, followed by a loud wash of sound emanating from stark silence, and I'm in a world of hurt. As my cat edged near the stereo speaker, hunting the aliens within, I nursed my wounds and turned my attention to the compositional technique and musical themes behind Nick Peck's Islands in the Stream.
As its title implies, the CD is a musical representation of a stream, including the rocks and other disruptions that pop up along the way. And just as a stream gathers its force from other streams, lakes, and tributaries, Islands bends and weaves its way through the musical landscape, drawing on a variety of musical influences.
"I had done progressive rock for a long time and wanted to do more purely synthesizer-based electronic music," says Peck. "I wanted to create a contrast between the flowing pieces that were all conceptually related and the other pieces that were larks or separate, distinct investigations that I was doing at the time."
These musical "obstructions" to Peck's stream are realized in works such as "The Rose Mirror," an acoustic piano piece, and "Imagining a Radio-Free Europe," which, with its Eastern European-influenced scales, conjures up images of a techno Turkish bazaar. Another island in Peck's musical stream, "A Fugue Made of Concrete," takes on a structure borrowed from a Bach fugue. Instead of orchestral instrumentation, however, Peck uses rattle, bangs, and grinding noises sampled with an E-mu EII+HD and manipulated in Digidesign's Turbosynth software. And where the theme in a Bach fugue is inverted by pitch, Peck inverts the low and high harmonics of his sonic constructions.
"Mpathy" is Peck's tribute to his progressive-rock influences. "I used M, an algorithmic composition program, to create themes based around performance techniques of artists I really dig," explains Peck. "I played back these themes using only FM synth sounds from a Yamaha TX816. The opening melody is sort of a reworking of a motive from King Crimson's 'Frame by Frame' off Three of a Perfect Pair. Also, I used a lot of motion and diatonic movement that reminds me of Rick Wakeman, particularly his soloing style."
So, has this shift from playing progressive rock to programming electronic sounds helped Peck find that elusive artistic voice? "Absolutely," responds Peck. "As Cage said, 'All sound is music.' And where that is for you depends upon your ears and nothing else. It's perfectly fine for someone to define music as something that happens in a diatonic universe with guitar, bass, and drums. That's completely wonderful, but it's just one archipelago in the musical ocean."
In Review, Keyboard, April 1995
By Robert Doerschuk
Fourteen selections, ranging from less than one minute to more than ten, highlight Peck's diverse aesthetic. In general, he's an abstractionist, with academic leanings. Yet his music is accessible to listeners more stirred by emotion than technique. Lots of rich analog work here, with one piece realized on a Serge system, another on a Buchla 100, and so on.
Nick Peck's Bio:
Nick is a San Francisco Bay Area native. He began piano lessons at 8.
Peck spent his teenage years exploring pop music, and began writing
his own compositions at 18. He began playing in progressive rock bands
while in college. Starting in the late 80's, Peck fronted the Marin
County-based prog rock group Episode for about a decade, recording two
albums and gigging regionally. Peck continued his formal training in
electronic music, receiving a BA from San Francisco State University
and MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California. During that period,
he focused on composing serious 20th century electronic music,
particularly using modular analog synthesizers, analog tape, and field
recordings.
In the mid-nineties, Peck recorded a big, sprawling epic progressive
rock album called Under the Big Tree. The creation of this album
marked a shift of focus from structured music to more improvisational
techniques. He then co-founded the jamband Ten Ton Chicken. Though
Peck had been playing Hammond organ since he was a teenager, it was
during this period that the organ really became his primary
instrument. After five years, 150 gigs, and two albums with the band,
Peck left to focus on jazz. Six months later, he formed the Mill
Valley Jazz Collective, a soul jazz group.
In 2004, Peck formed Sycamore Park, a funk/jazz band which recorded
and gigged around the Bay Area for a couple of years. His most recent
project is an album of acid and soul jazz compositions entitled "Fire
Trucks I Have Known", which was released in September 2007. As of this
writing, Peck is rehearsing up a new band, the Nick Peck Organ Trio,
to gig in support of the album.
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