Album Notes

For the last twenty years Steve Layton has lived and worked in Seattle, creating a kind of music that blurs the distinctions between electronic and acoustic art forms, as well as the notions of "traditional" and "experimental". The attempt is to invoke, alter, or dissolve questions of history, culture, even the "real" and "unreal", in the mind and ear of the listener.

While his debt to such teachers as Greg Steinke, William Billingsley, Barney Childs, Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick, Gordon Mumma, and Walter Aschaffenburg is great, Layton has always learned quite as much by paying happy attention to the music of every time and culture. Besides commissions for works from many western-states organizations, Layton has collaborated extensively with both dancers and video artists, and currently is very much involved with the development of new means of propagating contemporary art music via the world wide web.

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"In my work, traditional and 'imaginary' modern classical mix it up with electronic, historical, and world vernacular influences. My music operates on a number of different levels, making an often dense, but rich and colorful music.

'Traditional' and 'avant-garde', 'possible' and 'impossible' music? To me, each piece reinvents a World; through the past, in ways that could only happen here and now."

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"All Bright Things" is a collection of recent work from late 2002 through early 2003, for everything from piano to orchestra to electronics.