March 21, 2024

There are a ton of these Mandala pieces floating around - these symetrical, slow-moving shapes I freehanded in my notebook. I have maybe 10 of them record, but this is a fragment of two recordings of the very first one. I let my ear guide the movements I made on the piano, always rationalizing each chord change as a mirror image, pivoting off of one or two notes. It was rooted in Ligeti's harmonic language, how sound structure he made would move and morph over time in ways that visually made sense when you laid the pitches out on paper like a piano roll.

I think these are nice to listen to, but if you asked me why I wrote them I wouldn't have a clear answer. Sometimes you just get pulled in a direction and go with it. I'm grateful in finding this technique for it's beneficial porperties on my ebow playing. Making smooth transitions that don't jump out to the top of the texture takes practice and I got there through brute force. At the end, in Guitar Cult practifce, I described it this way: the ebows are the surface of the water, and there will be little laps of current even in relatively still water. If you hear yourself above the rest of the texture, you're introducing current, which will make others want to play louder and introduce current. Best to lower back down to the surface if you hear yourself.