paul klee once introduced a lecture with a humble and beautiful acknowledgment of the relationship between his talking and his paintings:

speaking here in the presence of my work, which should really express itself in its own language, i feel a little anxious as to whether i am justified in doing so and whether i shall be able to find the right approach.

but i comfort myself with the thought that my words do not address themselves to you in isolation, but will complement and bring into focus the impressions, perhaps still a little hazy, which you have already received from my pictures. if i should, in some measure, succeed in giving this lead, i should be content and should feel that i had found the justification which i had required.

i am equally anxious–how shall i write about these songs, these creations which may speak to you in their own language? i’ll ease my way into writing with some brief remarks on visual imagination:

i’ve always been very visual, and i’ve started exploiting (for music-creation purposes) the relationship between my visual and auditory senses. as i experiment with sounds i am often reminded of particular images or color-fields. certain collections of images naturally bond together to evoke a landscape, or a new image. i mix sound-layers together the way a painter might mix colors, or even compositional elements within the frame of a painting–i’m aware not only of building an acoustic space, but also of shaping a song with its imagery.

this isn’t to say that each finished song maps to a unique, thoroughly defined “painting.” but the music is animated by the way sound activates a listener’s visual-imagination. i believe these songs open themselves to you if you spend time immersed in them.

i can’t resist writing a little about this project. until this week, i hadn’t properly completed an album since high school. certainly my taste and the character of my creative output has changed much–and into directions unimagined when i was eighteen–in the last six years. i’m pleased to share, at long last, some of my recent creative work, some fruits of growth.

it’s very easy to play music, to experiment. but for me it’s quite difficult to work consciously toward the idea of a completed work. the idea becomes an abstract obsession, constantly reshaped by my imagination, while the actual work fails to resolve with the ideal, or seems unfathomable when i sit down to play. fortunately, topher cyll came along with “narmo”–national album recording month–in may of 2006. here was a great exercise in focus and motivation: the album had to be completed in thirty-one days. while i had imagined, prior to may, an evolutionary-themed project, once the clock was ticking i was pressured to focus on the material at hand in its own right, as growing bodies of sound, rather than pass time thinking ideologically.

quickly i realized that, although i was not intentionally creating music “about evolution” (especially since i dropped all lyrical content), the process of creating these songs was precisely one of mutation and selection. i recorded some proto-songs and began taking pieces of these songs and mixing them together, building by addition and subtraction. once some elemental structure was there, the songs, like embryos, grew naturally (with a good deal of nurturing of course).

when june first hit, i was happy to have recorded an album, though i hesitated to call it complete. i took a break this summer before returning to the work with fresh ears. i’m still reluctant to call it “complete,” but these mixes excite me. although i didn’t intend it, “fish got legs” is the perfect title for this album insofar as it’s only a moment in my artistic evolution–a fossil documenting a period of growth, of moving toward new terrain. i only hope to continue to grow, and i welcome all of you to spend some time with this music. thank you!

to download,
mac - ctrl + click, “download…”
windows - right click, “save…”

[these are 256 kbps MP3s]

.wav and .mp3 files will be posted to the site, and fgl will release a limited number of cds later this summer.

this blog will contain everything until the time is found to build the rest of the site.

bienvenidos, amigos.