GANYMEDE (2015)
72'
piano, music box, sine waves on lathe-cut records
on hibernate recs (hb56)
ganymede was created entirely from the opening bars of a Schubert art song, "Ganymed," based on a text by Goethe. In the poem, the speaker becomes profoundly allured by the beauty of God as manifested in the emergence of spring. For me, Schubert's Ganymed sits at a strange intersection between innocence and loss, childhood and maturity, the beautiful and the sinister. I was so infatuated that I began looking for ways to prolong the opening bars of "Ganymed" indefinitely. The notion of a kind of slow, patient, inescapable seduction though sound was of enormous interest to me, made all the more fascinating by the ominously complex undertone of Ganymed's abduction in other versions of the Greek myth. This is the kernel from which this album began - a simple melody washing against the ear gently, insistently, pulling one's thoughts and desires into deeper, darker mental chambers, drifting quietly into eternity.
The title track was originally conceived as an installation for multiple turntablists playing custom records derived from Schubert's song, which are in turn amplified by plastic cups and baby monitors. The album also contains a set of collage pieces based on the original records (glow I-IV) and a piece for four turntables without records (im morgenglanze).