“Tessellations,” my collaboration with Marcus Fischer is now officially released! It’s a limited edition of 250 vinyls available from Optic Echo, Experimedia in North America, Norman Records (UK) and Stashed Goods (UK, link to come). Note that the vinyls come with a download code with a bonus track, “Music for Caverns” as well.
Photo by Seth Chrisman
Marc and I have a long history of playing music together, mostly with me as a guest with his band Unrecognizable Now, in both recordings and live performances. So when Mike Jedlicka of Optic Echo Records asked us to collaborate on an album together, it was a natural progression.
We got together for five live tracking sessions in his studio, Arbor Suite, and recorded nearly 4 hours of long form improvisations on various instruments. I played cello, piano, synthesizer, and guitar, and Marc played his panoply of instruments, including guitar, lap-harp, tuning forks, electric piano, and percussion. We are both used to filling the spectral space by ourselves and it was a learning process to discover musical structures and playing styles that would work for both of us.
After that, it was a long process to shape each improvisation into a finished piece. Our goal was to preserve the feel of the improvisations (some of which were over 20 minutes long), while finding their true shape as a song. To that end, we mercilessly edited, resequenced, overdubbed and processed each improvisation into a piece.
I can say proudly that this is some of our best work and that our collaboration coalesced into a style that is pretty different and adventurous from our solo work. I hope that you all will take a chance on listening to “Tessellations” and it brings you somewhere new in your listening adventure.