“Refraction” was written for our sixth Echo Society show, “Family”, held in an old mansion perched on a hill in Silver Lake. When we divided up the performance spaces, I chose a room overlooking the tree-covered hillside which led down to homes and buildings below. Looking out the windows and thinking about the theme of family, I was reminded of moments from childhood- feelings had while looking out windows, being in my corner of the world and imaging what life was like out there in the world.
That got the wheels turning in the search for something tangible to draw upon for my piece relating to family. At first I went to a little darker side, working on a musical representation of family dysfunction: fighting parents in one room while a child sits in the other room, checked out and trying to escape through music. Emo, I know.
*not my family
But when I dug into a box of audio cassettes sent to me by my mother, I discovered a different viewpoint, and a better idea emerged.
Photo: John Simonsen
On one tape, my mother, who was in her early 30’s at the time, had the whole family together, and was interacting with my sister (3 yrs old) and I (6 months old), getting my sister to sing and me to make noises. Here was a snapshot of a moment in time, so pure. Pure and before the accumulation of childhood/parent frustrations, teenage rebellions…before accumulating decades of memories and interactions. Listening back was very emotional experience.
What struck me was how my brain went to the dark side first when thinking about family. And how memory and emotions can color and distort a reality of love that was there. About how people who love each other can end up doing things that aren’t loving at all, and getting in weird juxtaposed positions, engaged in fights, frustrations, miscommunications, grudges…unresolved issues that manifest as blocks and refractors of a more pure, original impulse of love. Unfortunately for some people, some really terrible things can be done by people who, at least at one time held love for them.
Whoo, heavy. I have no answers. But I liked the idea of a pure impulse of energy like love (or light) and how it can get refracted through our imperfect human brain and psychological systems (similar to how a prism refracts light). In a prism, that pure beam of light gets broken apart into different colors.
I sat at my piano and improvised along with the recordings, reacting and responding to all of this. That seemed to be the idea to run with.
Naturally, my next step was to buy a Fisher Price tape machine. I am a child of the 80’s after all, and that was one of my favorites growing up.
Boomin system
I bought two off ebay and rigged them up to be speakers to play the recordings, which I had digitized and looped in Logic. I then used AlterBoy from SoundToys to tune all the audio from the recordings onto a single note, which I could change the pitch of in real time using a midi keyboard. Kind of a vocoder of sorts. Those tuned recordings came out of my laptop to the Fisher Price speakers. I put the speakers on top of my piano, and there was my rig.
Photo: Karma McCartney
The piece was very cathartic to perform but intimidating on a number of levels. It was very intimate, exposing these recordings of my family (don’t worry I got their permission), and trying to be vulnerable to them in front of a room full of strangers wandering in and out for two shows, 90 mins each. Also the anxiety of keeping up enough interesting improvisations.
Photo: Michelle Shiers
I found certain chord progressions and melodies I kept coming back to. That’s what crystallized into this recorded version. I hope you enjoy the result.
Photo: Ben Wynn