AGORA

photography courtesy of meire todao

AGORA as a project is a solo effort completed february 2011

co-engineered in part by Antye Greie aka AGF

additional contributions by Zach Thorpe, Salakapakka Sound System, HeeG, Chaircrusher

record released july 1, 2011 on bitsquare.net

or a CD (CDr, limited edition 50 copies) at experimedia or discogs

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1. Invoce was a piece I had originally composed for solo voice, then sent to Antye Greie aka AGF, who engineered and processed the material and sent back. her alterations on my material encouraged me to intertwine sections from other pieces of mine; Behaviour State and Focus, to create a sort of medley and sonic family or thread which would begin to run through the album.

2. Overtaker began while editing a beat for a remix of a track by close friend and frequent collaborator HeeG, which I then added background and foreground vocals to, singing a lyric and creating a drone of my humming to fill the skeleton of the rhythm. I next created a digital meltdown of the beat to merge into another I had created, and finally added field recordings taken from Uganda and my own dictaphone material from America of poet Debberae Streett. through this process the song became its own story and I never completed HeeG’s mix. I owe him!

3. Flood Circuit was a piece which had existed for over a year and was initially intended to be the opening piece to my Elsewhere project. I re-fortified this track with additional sounds and vocals to include on this record.

4. Scrape was initially based off a poem. I omitted the poem’s text in the literal sense at the final stage of this composition’s evolution, leaving the vocal fragments to speak for themselves. this piece also features recordings of bells taken from my dictaphone and guest vocals courtesy of carahanni.

5. From Whiteness took a long time to develop and was actually the first piece I had written with the AGORA project in mind. the original beat to this track was minimal and, in retrospect, rather weak. my original vocal treatment called for a long hall, to accentuate my vocal hiss. AGF encouraged me to seek a stronger beat, and I composed a new instrumental in the space of a few hours. she also removed the hall on my voice to add engineering of her own, thereby strengthening the final product quite dramatically. the lyric to this piece was lain out in one take, as I listened to and free styled over this beat. the result is dadaist and makes no sense; the Arctic Circle and Pacific Ocean never meet in reality! I think of this track as a statement on global warming.

6. Focus was an unusual track. I had created a beat to sing over for myself, as I often do. on another level had put a call out to Zach Thorpe to send vocal improvisations to me for extra and potentially useful material. it so happened that his submission of that material collided with my working on this beat; as an experiment I imported the two files next to each other and they worked perfectly. I did not have to move or edit the pieces at all in relation to each other. I feel Zach must have been intuitively responding to something he had not heard, and this was a powerful moment for me to understand. this piece is placed central to the album for just that reason. AGF again applied engineering to this track and I created a sort of intro weaving some of the processed parts she sent me into a copied section of the beat. aside from that portion, though, the track is unedited. it might also be worth mentioning Zach is not using a language while singing.

** listen to me talk more about Focus HERE as part of an interview **

7. Behaviour State started while creating an instrumental with some recordings Salakapaka Sound System had sent me and came about as a response to facebook and social networking. I found myself reading the sourcecode to the main page on facebook and became disturbed by some of the phrases I found. this work contains the most AGF production of any on the record, she processed my vocals and beats and then I arranged them.

8. Remain is a beat piece I wrote as one of the last for the record, containing manipulated feedback and hand-claps, and a digital choir of myself.

9. Value System is a piece that originally was far more literal and straightforward than its final form. AGF manipulated my vocals via a patch prominent on her Head Slash Bauch record, and I created a bed for my vocals through more dictaphone recordings and sections of some noises in Focus and Scrape. I have done this cross-sampling at various points in the process of creating AGORA, to try and establish a sound family for the project.

10. Belief was created solely using my voice and was in part inspired by the compositions and encouragements of Gregory Whitehead. worth checking into!

11. Winter Consummation was the last piece created for the project, inspired by the endless snow I saw. this is an attempt to create frozen solace, and is helped along in part by recordings from Turkey taken by close friend Pedro Esquerra of artist Leyla Sabah. also some piano courtesy of Zach Thorpe crept in here. a solemn, reflective end to the record.

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