performance history
11/5/2021 - (two performances) - Line Upon Line Percussion. Small Batch @ UT Austin. Austin, TX
program note
In ceramics, ‘glost’ refers to clayware’s second kiln firing after a new coat of glaze has been applied. It often results in heavily textured, saturated, defined earthenware. In ceramics practices & the art that is produced, I have discovered meaningful metaphors for the processes that sonic materials undergo in my work: the extreme conditions of heat and pressure contained within a kiln, the fusing of distinct materials like glaze and clay that may happen within such a space, and the tactile, haptic relationship between thrown clay and its thrower... it all finds meaningful corollaries in the physical energies that initiate sound production.
To this end, the idea of the glost firing addresses a broader look at my developing relationship with sound and my creative process itself. The completion of every piece I write belies the years of thought and interrogation that’s been applied to the material so that it can be heard, in some sense, in a final, graspable form. But a finished piece is not the same as a finished project; the ideas and questions that found a form in one piece invariably push forward, continue to ask themselves, are seen as nascent again into the context of the next project. The glost fire bears witness to this turbulent process of constant emergence, interrogation, and discovery, for what just came out of the kiln can always be put back in.
In this case, the basic idea that has found shape in one firing (years ago), only to evolve again and again, in subsequent glost firings, into new shapes with new expressions and textures and potentialities, is the simple question: what might a sonic vocabulary built on the basic idea of friction sound like? This question has guided my percussion writing (and indeed much of my writing for all instruments) through many projects, and which continues to find new forms, new ways of speaking, new points of traction with each subsequent firing. The trio at hand, glost fire, bears slow witness to its protean materials - implements in reciprocity with cardboard sheets and steel strings, resonating through and amplified by three bass drums - finding forms, losing forms, and reemerging as something strange but ordered, graspable but uncanny.