We spent time in Littlefield: walking, listening, sharing stories, taking pictures, getting groceries, going to the local community festival around the corner. This piece is part of that time and place.
The recording space is porous, meaning there’s no definitive sonic delineation between “inside” and “outside”. We’re as much of the sonic landscape as the trees blowing in the front yard and the trucks driving by. The sounds on this recording reflect that unified field.
We’ve been exploring a system of music that utilises amorphous and indeterminate constraints at the outset, relying less on chord progressions, time signatures and predetermined form, and more so on a shared musical vocabulary and intuition. This approach in music provides an emptiness for collaborative improvisation to come into existence. Instead of opposing forces that counterbalance and/or juxtapose to forge something into being, this artistic practice evokes, reflects and resonates the “is-ness” of collective moments during recording.
At one point in the two day session, Andrew remarked, “it’s in every key! We can play any note, and it works!” Rhythms transform texture. Melody informs and becomes noise.
The title of the piece comes from a Rumi poem we saw in Jon Hassell’s Atmospherics book in the midst of his ruminations on magic realism, future musics, and new modes of organisation and “allowable” musical vocabulary:
Out beyond ideas of
wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
– Rumi
Listening is both the artist and the art; the gallery is you.
– Ryan
Slow shifts, trance of repetition, feeling out a shape in darkness
– AW
Recorded July 20, 2024 in Littlefield, TX with additional discussions, overdubs, embellishments, and mixing in Taipei, TW and Littlefield, TX over the following month and a half.
Mastered by Andrew Weathers