Behind the Music

For this project, jhon confronted me with the idea of a movement work which was inspired by process. He had been working with Not Yet Soaring and the Houston Metropolitan Dance Company and wanted to “remix” the work with a new live sound score. The movement was a combination of choreography, improvisation and “specific tasks” as jhon once told me. jhon gave me music that he had been working with to use as a reference with a good amount of freedom and boundaries, which are both crucial. He did have one major request and that was for me to perform the music live on stage. This indeed is how I prefer to make electronic music so how could I resist?

As I sat in rehearsal and listened to jhon’s selections, I saw a connection between many elements in the selected music and the movement that the company was passing through. I decided to re-texture the original music with my own drum/synthesizer, patches and patterns. I recorded some pattern and automated limited parameters as well as played another layer with different sounds live. I then applied effects to the original tracks and manipulated the remix originals and vocals in a variety of ways. I utilized various software and hardware configurations in a time-code controlled digital music production environment. I also wrote a few original tracks for various spoken word sections, recording myself with various instruments and my nephew Alex DiMatteo on djembe. I worked on most of the musical ideals in rehearsal, then recorded various parts to layer into a super-hero, multi-layer monster of wires, waves and sequences.

Here is a list of the tools that I used to produce, record and perform the music live for Still Confronting the Ground with the Houston Met Dance Company.