Veteran Erased Tapes recording artist Peter Broderick set to release new studio album Partners on 19th August 2016.
For close to a decade, Portland’s Peter Broderick has cut his own unpredictable path through the world of contemporary music. So far, his wanderings have led him from solo works into the realms of film, dance and documentary scores, as well as art installations.
Now Peter takes that unpredictability one step further. For his latest album, a series of voice and piano recordings, he experiments with chance, surrendering an entire song’s composition to the roll of dice.
As he explains below in an email to Erased Tapes founder Robert Raths, it was John Cage’s tendency to remove himself from his music, to somehow automate his own process, which inspired the strange mechanics with which this record was created.
In the words of Cage himself, ‘the world is teeming; anything can happen.’
In an email to Robert on February 3rd 2016:
Dear Robert.
There’s a lot I’d love to tell you about this music.
The inspiration really came when I decided to learn to play John Cage’s In A Landscape on the piano . . . I listened to a recording I had over and over again, five seconds or so at a time, picking out every single note. Then cross referencing what I’d learned with other versions of the piece as well as the original score. The feeling of playing this piece really brought me close to the piano again, and brought new life to my own piano songs.
Beyond Cage’s music, his life and practice have interested me more and more, after having read about his love for foraging wild foods and using chance operations to compose music, in a sense taking his ‘self’ out of the music. I love his so-called ‘mesostics’ and began to write several poems using that method, around ....... more
Veteran Erased Tapes recording artist Peter Broderick set to release new studio album Partners on 19th August 2016.
For close to a decade, Portland’s Peter Broderick has cut his own unpredictable path through the world of contemporary music. So far, his wanderings have led him from solo works into the realms of film, dance and documentary scores, as well as art installations.
Now Peter takes that unpredictability one step further. For his latest album, a series of voice and piano recordings, he experiments with chance, surrendering an entire song’s composition to the roll of dice.
As he explains below in an email to Erased Tapes founder Robert Raths, it was John Cage’s tendency to remove himself from his music, to somehow automate his own process, which inspired the strange mechanics with which this record was created.
In the words of Cage himself, ‘the world is teeming; anything can happen.’
In an email to Robert on February 3rd 2016:
Dear Robert.
There’s a lot I’d love to tell you about this music.
The inspiration really came when I decided to learn to play John Cage’s In A Landscape on the piano . . . I listened to a recording I had over and over again, five seconds or so at a time, picking out every single note. Then cross referencing what I’d learned with other versions of the piece as well as the original score. The feeling of playing this piece really brought me close to the piano again, and brought new life to my own piano songs.
Beyond Cage’s music, his life and practice have interested me more and more, after having read about his love for foraging wild foods and using chance operations to compose music, in a sense taking his ‘self’ out of the music. I love his so-called ‘mesostics’ and began to write several poems using that method, around ....... more