Please provide a brief description of each track on your current album. Anything you want to say.
Avulse Overall:
This ep was written right around the time that a collaboration with another artist whose work I admired unfortunately turned sour and ended in a kind of ugly way. That ending brought up some feelings about other toxic relationships from my past and how their endings were painful, but very freeing. The EP ended up being mostly about that idea of shedding things that hold you back or hurt you.
The word “avulse” means “to tear away.” It’s often used in medicine to indicate flesh or bone that has been torn away from the body. It’s a visceral idea that matches with the subject of painfully tearing away things that we loved or were supposed to love us, but were actually poison. t’s sometimes tricky to get a specific idea across with instrumental music, but I’m usually trying to capture a kind of nuanced feeling related to a topic with my music. The titles end up being very meaningful. I wrestle a little with letting listeners find their own interpretations and providing the context that created the music for me.
Slough:
I rediscovered pitch bend and fm synthesis with this, which was fun. The song alternates between two major ideas: this bendy, groaning, moaning synth that modulates and grows more dense as the song progresses; and a brighter fm arpeggio that also breathes and resonates. It’s very much driven by space and timbre. Slough is a verb that means to shed skin or to get rid of something undesirable. If you’ve watched an insect or a spider moult, they push out of their old exoskeleton in a sort of rhythmic way that alternates between intense pushing and resting that I’m trying a bit to capture here.
Chronophage:
This is sort of a waltz, actually. I wanted to capture a sense of very precise timing but also give the impression of being chased by something large that walks a bit off kilter. Like a big, galloping centipede or something.
There’s a sculptural clock at the University of Cambridge called the Corpus Clock and I’m lightly referencing the mechanical-nightmare cricket which is also called The Chronophage, that is part of that sculpture. Really, the main idea behind the title is the idea of “time eater.” For whatever reason, some of my most toxic relationships were often those that were the longest lasting. I let those people eat up big portions of my life. Time is a very frightening concept for me that I deal with frequently in my work. It moves very quickly and seems to have a huge magnitude that can’t be stopped or held. I often feel it as a pressure from behind. It’s precious and fleeting.
Husk:
This is my personal favorite from the EP. It’s something of a continuation of Slough and I think it might have started as an alternate version of Slough. Again, the theme is skin, “husk” being the empty shell left behind after the shed, and again the main musical idea is a bendy, groaning, moaning, synth. Husk replaces the breathing arpeggios found in Slough with piercing feedback and spacious resonance. While Slough is more driven by timbre and space, Husk is dominated by a 3-3-2 kick drum groove.
Basilisk:
The poisonous beast itself!
The title here is actually a reference to a specific person. They called themselves this at one point. They were right. The main musical idea here is drones that are embodied with movement as a product of being cross modulated by a kick/clap groove. The first two-thirds of the song are just two notes that kind of imply a locrian modal area. That gets confirmed in the last section, so there’s sort of a question that’s answered there, but it’s locrian so everything’s still very unsettling.
Des pas sur les cendres:
I have a lot of admiration for Debussy and his approaches to music and this song is something I’ve wanted to do for a while. All of this musical material comes from his Des pas sur la neige, which is one of my favorite piano works. I’m a terrible piano player, so when I like something a lot but can’t play it, sometimes I just steal its ideas and try to expand on them.
The main melodic idea here is played by the breathing, arpeggiated synth from Slough, and the chords in the last section are played by the same synth as the crazy, screaming arpeggio from Chronophage. I didn’t want to leave the EP in this bitter, angry place where all the other tracks land. The point of the whole thing is that going through these painful experiences, realizing that people we cared for are poisonous, and ending those relationships, is ultimately for our betterment. While the opening is somewhat timid, there’s a triumphant quality to the chord progression at the
end of this. My hope is that it gives the sense of walking away through the ashes of burned bridges into a better future.
