A majority of our discussion these last four years has been about the discovery what it is we “make” as musicians. The answer seems obvious on the surface, but when viewed in light of the “thingness” of music, the object of our creation becomes less clear. Much of this confusion arises from the very term we use to discuss our art: music.
As we spend the next years of our career delving into this ideas to more fully understand the nature of the thing we make, we have chosen to sidestep that word somewhat. To say we create “music” is to assume a connotative framework that leaves one mired in the world of iTunes, Amazon, Napster, and Ticketmaster. Yet, we feel that what we do – and almost all “musicians” really – is create works of art that use sound and performance as the delivery mechanism and substance.
We sculpt time and space through sound, intentionally diverting any given place and moment towards something more beautiful and more memorable than what would have been had we kept silent. Isn’t that why musicians play music anyway?
Thinking this way has led us to also reconsider aesthetic choices as well. As our sound will attest, we have come to prefer the spontaneity and ephemerality that improvisation and loose composition affords us. The blog is a place for digging into this issue further. At the very least, rethinking “music” has opened whole new ways to dream of possibilities for what we might make today.