Interview Conducted by Carolyn Zaldivar Snow aka Tangent Universes

Carolyn: How are you guys doing this week? Do you have day jobs? 

Tyler: I’m doing pretty okay at the moment. I currently hold a day job in sales as well as a side hustle doing quality control work for audiobooks as well as the occasional recording/mixing/mastering job usually just for close friends.

Morgan: Feeling alright. I work in higher ed administration. I resisted having a 'normal' job for years, but now I've settled into it and my life is way simpler. My creative mind is somehow a little clearer now that I'm not hustling so hard to just get by. 

C: I know you live down the street from one another in the same neighborhood as MANNA and Great Circles - what's in the water over there? How many synthesizers in a 2 mile radius? 

T: I would assume quite a large number of synthesizers but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I’m a pretty introverted and socially anxious person. We quite love MANNA’s work and have talked about working on something together this year, hopefully. A goal I have is to get out and meet more people in the community and attend more events. GC are great and constantly putting on a lot of cool stuff, I’ve discovered a ton of excellent music via their radio shows. We actually heard Visible Cloaks/Yoshio Ojima/Satsuki Shibano’s FRKWYS release Serenitatem for the first time over the speakers at Passages. We shazam’d it to figure out what it was and both became obsessed with the record and that group. In a lot of ways that event really informed the direction of this record. I was fortunate to attend a workshop with Ryan and Spencer (Of Visible Cloaks) in France which led to me getting the opportunity to release an album on Ryan’s label this year. It’s likely none of that would have happened had we not attended Passages. 

M: I definitely enjoy staying hydrated with my Delaware river sourced tap water, but it feels a little gross to say that. The Great Circles series and the space and environment they cultivate at their shows is fantastic. Not to mention the great sound! I think our proximity to each other has made the project come together with a relative ease. When we are working on recording music, we can be really consistent in our sessions and as I am also a total introvert, I need travel distances to be small so I have fewer excuses to just stay home. 

C: How did you meet? How does a violinist who has worked with Alvin Lucier meet a touring member of Gym Class Heroes and decide to make New Age music? 

T: We met initially at Morgan’s wedding in Boston. His partner and mine have been friends for a long time. Years later they ended up moving to Philadelphia walking distance from where my partner and I live. We were hanging out one night at our favorite bar The Lunar Inn (RIP) and just got to talking about music/art and found we both shared a lot of interests. We got together at my studio and started recording and found we had a very complimentary relationship. Morgan has a lot more formal musical training in terms of theory/harmony and I have more of a production/recording background. I also feel like being in very close physical proximity to one another makes for a very relaxed low stakes creative environment. Sometimes after a long day of suffering under capitalism it’s difficult to find the energy to work on your creative endeavors so being quite literally a 5 minute walk away from one another is really great. 

M: Yeah, kind of lucky that our life partners are old friends and we shared this very particular interest. My background is in the more austere experimental and improvised music like Alvin and Morton Feldman, but I also really love the classic and private press new age/ambient music from Jordan de la Sierra and Alice Damon to Harold Budd and Hiroshi Yoshimura. When I moved to Philadelphia, it was great to connect those interests with Tyler and be able to do something quite different than what I had been involved with for so many years. 

C: You like all tools and methods. Soft synths, digital flutes, toy pianos, live strings, and field recordings-- what are you into lately? What are you drawn to? 

T: Lately I’m very into Physical Modeling synthesis/instruments and granular sampling. The Ableton Granulator II is maybe one of our most used devices. I’m particularly fond of sounds that have some basis in reality but that are obscured or manipulated in some way. Physical modeling allows us to do things like combine a harp string with the body resonance of a guitar in a hallway closet essentially creating imagined instruments that trick the ear in a sense. I like taking those elements and juxtaposing them against pure synthetic sounds. We do this with field recordings as well, ocean waves and broken modems, soft pads and fake clarinets. To me it all has this unique effect of creating sonic spaces that feel equal parts familiar and foreign. 

M: I'm getting more into vocoders and trying out some experiments with various text sources and randomizing elements of the synth sound. I’ve been experimenting with Kaivo and Vital and trying to learn how to get the sounds I imagine. I'm also trying to make more of a habit of collecting simple sounds in my environment and throughout my day. I'm a total minimalist so I'm often just happy with the most simple of sounds and trying to let them find the right space and arrangement to be themselves and breathe properly. 

C: I love the track "Sculpted Breaths", what's happening in the spoken word parts? What's the story behind it?  

T: I was super interested in working with vocal/spoken content but really dislike the sound of my own voice. I put out an open call to friends to send me some voice recordings. I used AI to generate a series of poems and sent them out to the people that responded. My friend and former bandmate Matt Mcginley was kind enough to record his daughter Zooey reading one of them. I used her voice and the cadence and pitches of her words to generate midi data for every other element in the piece. The only additional element was a field recording of windshield wipers from a car interior. Matt is also an incredible composer and does a lot of music for podcasts including SERIAL and This American Life.

C: If you each have to pick one piece from ‘Heuristic Environments’, which one are you going with? 

T: I’m really proud of “Woven Into Stillness”. It started off with this multi-layered patch that’s somewhere between a harp, an acoustic guitar and a piano. Morgan improvised a nice minimal violin part which we then also translated into midi data to control a variety of different string VST’s. We then took his audio track and pitched it down a full octave and repeated this process. The combination of these different techniques resulted in something that sounded like a highly composed string section that was in fact created from one track of improvised violin. This technique is a bit of a reoccurring theme throughout the record and a huge part of our process, often utilizing one simple element to create note data to inform a much larger more involved piece.

M: I really like how "The Earth as a Magnet" turned out. The combination of layered textured and motivic violin along with the granular textures really offers a lot to listen to. There is also this moment around three and a half minutes that is super juicy where things kind of arrive. The piece is really busy with tons of soft micro sounds but also somehow very static - a nice thing to continue to work towards. 

C: So what's a Heuristic Environment anyway? 

T: The term heuristic has two meanings. One refers to enabling someone to discover or learn something for themselves which I think is a great way to define our relationship with Ableton / recording in general. The other is in relation to computing and refers to proceeding toward a solution by trial and error or by rules that are only loosely defined. I feel like both of those definitions relate to the way we create, process ,compose and think about our musical output. I think of musical works as portable reliable environments - places we visit for peace, motivation, inspiration or a variety of other reasons. We all use music / sound in varying degrees like medicine to shape our daily existence. Our finished pieces are the result of heuristic processes / experimentation as defined in both definitions. I hope that answers the question and isn’t just a bunch of word salad haha.

C: You're both fine artists in traditional studio methods, but are not afraid to incorporate AI and digital processing in your work-- tell me about Earthroom's relationship to art.

T: I only got into painting only in the last few years, I go through periods of agitation with existence and not wanting to do music at all. Having another creative outlet where I feel the stakes are much lower helps me to be a more balanced person. I started messing about with AI art and really loved it as it offered the same sort of qualities I like in physical modeling sound design but visually. It allowed me to create assets that had some basis in a specific reality but were either wrong in some way or overly hyperrealistic. Morgan has more formal training and has a great eye for composition and layout and really has a larger role as far as the art is concerned.

M: I try not to separate art from music at all, though it is a sort of impossible task. My work is often visual - using collage, sculpture, assemblage, photography, installation, or whatever I'm feeling drawn to that will engage with the concepts or ideas I'm working with. Sometimes the ideas want to be expressed sonically, and sometimes with various combinations of elements - I like to imagine the creative expanse being relatively fluid. With Earthroom, I'm happy to use whatever tools are available to imagine visual spaces that correspond to the sonic environments - much of the time it is photoshop and AI because the results I can get from those tools reflect the sort of real/artificial line that the music is balancing upon. 

C: Immersive sound design is part of the Earthroom experience - any tricks of the trade or new tools you're willing to share?

T: I could go on forever about tools and tricks but I’ll try to keep it concise. For synths I’m really loving Kaivo and Imagine, both physical modeling synths but wildly different animals. I’ll forever love the Yamaha DX7 as well, it’s unbelievable the range of sounds one can squeeze out of it. Also really enjoying the SWAM physically modeled instruments particularly the woodwinds I’m almost overly obsessed with them. The GRM tools suite and Ableton’s Convolution reverb are a huge part of our sound as far as post processing goes.

From a compositional standpoint we utilize a lot of M4L Euclidean sequencers, chance operations and randomization. MIDI translation and or “imprinting” is another source of inspiration, taking a sample, field recording or random audio file, converting to midi and then manipulating that data as a starting point for a new piece of music. Sort of like sampling but also not at all like sampling as the original source audio material has no real bearing on the new piece. 

M: Our trick is that we have Tyler who is an obsessive genius who is able to make the absolute most out of the tools that we have access to and that there is always a very experimental spirit when approaching any of the tools mentioned above. 

C: Tell me about what's next for solo projects? 

T: I’m excited to be releasing my next solo record in Dolby Atmos on a new label called Random Walk created by Ryan Carlile of Visible Cloaks. The album will have a visual component and be released physically on Blu-Ray. I’m super excited about the potential for Spatial Audio in experimental music and really hope to see more artists engaging with this format. Additionally I’m in the process of trying to find funding for a project based around taking field recordings from our national parks and utilizing the midi translation technique to create/release music that is effectively composed by physical environments, in this case our National Parks. I’m very new to the world of grant writing/higher education so not sure how this is going to go, but it will be my main focus for 2024. 

M: I'm always working on a slew of things but no upcoming releases right now. I've got a correspondence project going with a longtime collaborator Luke Martin of concepts and piano sounds. I'll be working with my friend J.P.A. Falzone again this summer on a couple of new composed pieces. I'm also getting re-aquainted with transducers, motors, and vibrating objects and working with a more fluid and austere noise/violin sound. Things are happening but slowly. 

LINKS

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