Album Notes
Like Robert Henke, Keith Fullerton Whitman, or Christopher Willits, Gregory Taylor takes on the problem of developing new ways to originate pieces by setting aside typical compositional / improvisational techniques in favor of developing new technologies capable not only of generating sound, but of creating music. Here he unifies the practice of synthesis, sampling, processing and looping into a single, simultaneously occurring stream of events that the listener perceives in the same living moment in which the composer creates. The resulting music is a shifting, densely interrelated cloud of layered and juxtaposed materials which essentially make music out of music.
References point forward to a completely post-modern aesthetic while acknowledging a deep love of past and traditional musics, especially the intricate patterns and lush tunings of gamelan. Gregory’s approach creates a deep context that allows the listener to follow the sometimes smooth, sometimes abrupt turns to the entirely new, while discovering the subtle and numerous coherences of all the elements.
His first CD for PoL, Amalgam: Aluminum / Hydrogen proves to be a marriage of buoyancy and structure. It is a single unedited recording of a live improvised performance by a radiaL virtuoso that unites the tunings and epicyclic forms of gamelan music that characterized Taylor’s 80s cassette culture releases with the timbres and aural surfaces of glitch, ambient and lowercase musics.
