There are two months left in 2019, the leaves are turning and there’s a refreshing chill in the air. The warm sunny San Francisco days are still going strong. It has been a year of many changes, good and not so good...and a reckoning with unfinished projects from years past.
This perfect October weather and my daily almond cappuccino has been fueling what I’ve been calling my “Release The Music” campaign.
I am sitting on literally a dozen or more album or album ideas and quite a few of them are very close to immediate release. Most of these works are modern dance related, works that I’ve composed for choreographers over the past 15 years or more. Others are concept albums or theme related like music for kora or my cello/viola da gamba record or new music for ondes martenot or combinations of marxophone, ukelin and tremoloa. The list goes on.
But seeing as I’ve two months left to make the best out of 2019 and to wrap up an incredibly prolific decade, I’ve decided to start with my most notable modern dance works of the last 15 years. I’d remix or re-record as necessary, do a minimal mastering job and let my imagination run wild with album art design. Seeing as these will initially be digital releases, I only need a single image. This process of coming up with images has been really fun and has spurred me on to releasing the music!
My September release “Milieu”, works composed for Robert Dekkers of Post:Ballet, commemorating our 10 year collaboration, is the first in a series of these dance releases. 2009 was the debut of my ballet “Milieu” and not only marked the beginning of a 10 year collaboration with Robert Dekkers but also my collaborations with Toshi Anders Hoo which led to the creating of our planetarium show “Earth Portal” and our most recent innovations in music making in VR with “Exponentia (don’t blink)” composed in LyraVR. 2009 was also the beginning of LoveTech, a community project showcasing the bay area’s local electronic music scene with an emphasis on live controllerism, looping and instrument making with artists like Moldover, Rich DDT and my own music moniker Colfax. This also marks the 10 year anniversary of my debut Colfax album “Tape”, which is due for a follow up…quite a few in fact! More on Colfax later!
There’s a lot to celebrate in 2019 and I can think of no better way to bring in the new decade than by RELEASING THE MUSIC!
My plan at this point is to start with the works I composed for choreographer Heidi Schweiker with whom I’ve written 3 modern dance pieces between 2005 and 2008. On October 21, 2019 I will release the music of our first two works, “Come Rain” and “Dust Collective” which will include bonus tracks. Then about a week later, around Halloween, I’ll release our third work, “Dreams Of Speaking”. I’m also considering releasing on or around Halloween, my spooky quadraphonic electronic dance experience, “In The Container”.
“Come Rain”(2005) was a milestone in my musical output. I considered it my first real mature work. It featured my old Lark portable phonograph which I sampled and played as one would a modern one, creating scratching effects and textures. It also features piano, percussion, bass, vocal samples and a liberal use of granular synthesis using the powerful software granular synth, Metasynth. All of this density was to accompany the depth of Heidi Schweiker’s solo choreography.
The second work on the “Come Rain” release is “Dust Collective” (2006). This work involved several dancers and the score was composed using samples of my grandmother’s antique brass bowls, rattan mallets, Roland Jupiter 8 synthesizer, environmental sounds and laptop. Like “Come Rain”, the subject is unclear. It’s abstract sound reflects the figurative movement. There seems to be a theme of entropy or decay. “Dust Collective”, like it’s name, is made up of raw materials. The imperfections of analog. Even my 40 year old Jupiter 8 spews out unintended tones of broken fuzzy yumminess. These two dance works were very strong in their execution. The music was more akin to it’s author, gritty, dreamy, longing.
The third work in our oeuvre is “Dreams Of Speaking” (2008). This was an evening length work that premiered at Dance Mission in San Francisco. Looking back, it seemed thrown together in a way that allowed for more free expression. It was less abstract and reserved than “Come Rain” and “Dust Collective” and featured my acoustic guitar playing, gratuitous mellotrons and my own singing. I didn’t take it as seriously as the last two in retrospect, probably because it wasn’t innovating new sounds but rather bringing back familiar sounds. Also, there were quite a few rejected tracks so the final work was more serving to the dance. But, revisiting this work the past few months was very eye opening…in a good way!
Since 2011 I’d been going back to songwriting like I did in my teens. I joined a group that writes, records and posts a song a day for the month of February. Song-A-Day was a game changer for me and has helped me reunite with my singer-songwriter self. I’ve since written about 200 songs and continue to write and perform them.
“Dreams Of Speaking” reopened that door to my voice. There are two songs with words and two others with just my voice singing vocalise. I realized after all these years, especially with the addition of the bonus tracks, that a full length emotionally stirring album was there waiting for me all along.
”In The Container” (2008) was like a long forgotten elaborate dream. The location was the cavernous basement of San Francisco Dance Center on Market St. in San Francisco. Mostly empty except for scraps of metal and wood which became sample material for the score, the space also had amazing acoustics. As you would arrive at the show, you were guided through an artist realized tunnel with different scenes happening, a girl humming and playing with objects, sweeping, a solitary man in a room with phonograph, a woman in a tub, me playing a toy piano in a corner, etc. The audience would arrive at center stage surrounded by a quadraphonic sound system. I performed the electronic score live which included samples from the tunnel surrounding the audience. This eerie score sat in my hard drive for over 10 years without revisiting it. It was so gratifying to rediscover it and I’m excited to include it in my RELEASE THE MUSIC campaign!
That concludes my efforts for October, 2019. November has a cornucopia in store! Stay tuned!
Daniel Berkman