Wednesday, October 23, 2013

"Horizontal Movements"


I composed these 2 pieces almost 2 years ago, but even though they are very autobiographical, I never really talked about the inspiration for them. So I've added a description on SoundCloud.
Like a lot of my music, these 2 pieces are autobiographical, at least in the sense that they were composed during and immediately in response to some significant events in my life - in this case my involvement in the Occupy Wall Street protests. They were composed in late December 2011 through early January 2012, while I was taking some time off from activism to recuperate after police chaos and setbacks of late November and December. The "Frozen Zone" of the titles refers to both the blockade that the NYPD set up in the Financial District in the middle of the night as they evicted protesters from Liberty Square, and more metaphorically to all systemic injustice.

Although the music doesn't convey any overt political messages, the act of writing it was kind of a meditation on the idea of leaderless organizing (the anarchist political philosophy of "Horizontalidad / Horizontalism"). I think of the sounds as being "horizontal" in the sense that there's no hierarchy working to organize them. The musical parts aren't divided into "instruments or "voices" - there's just a single algorithm generating clusters of sine waves. Those individual sine waves, which only differ in pitch and amplitude, converge temporarily to create harmonies, and then dissipate.

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