Palaver

Inspired by the stream that flows through my parents’ town in upstate New York, this piece was written as a descriptive reflection of movement and stillness. I have walked along the banks of this frozen brook in Winter, witnessed its healthy rushing energy in Autumn and savored its pacifying calm in green Spring. Its name suggests imagery of both heat and coolness, and I wanted this to be represented in the mixing. The solemn stillness of the single icey tone and jagged high frequency shards of feedback balance out through Greg’s impressive mastering which seems to have run through the buzzing warmth of analog tubes. The genesis of sound is a square wave frequency, which is then bent and shaped by echoing delay and feedback rhythms and an octave shift, manipulated subtly and slowly to reflect the contours of its wired trajectory. Electronic current mimicks the flow of rushing water through a riverbasin while also conjuring the image of temporal stillness, timelessness.