Traces:George (2021)
TRACES:GEORGE is a piece for electric guitar with live-electronic processing.
In 2020, Traces:George was commissioned by the Wayward Music Series to be a part of the Wayward-in-Limbo Pandemic sessions. The show featured all 4 Traces, including the premiere of Traces:George for electric guitar and live-electronic processing. Traces:George is dedicated to my friend and teacher George Thomason.
The four pieces that make up the traces series recording are part of a series of works entitled Traces. One might consider them ghost stories. In my youth I was obsessed with Harry Houdini, especially his interactions with Sir Conan Doyle, and their arguments about spiritualism and the paranormal. From there I stumbled onto the practice of EVP (electronic voice phenomenon). As a young person with an obsessive relationship to sound and access to a reel-to-reel tape recorder, this seemed to give my life a purpose: to find and record “invisible” sounds and otherwise unheard voices. These four works for performers and interactive electronics are a remembrance of that period in my life, each a meditation on loss, grief, and memory. They are a search for what remains in the absence of known things, real things, loved things. They each began as an incantation, a conjuring, giving voice to the inaudible and form to the imperceptible. What emerges are traces and remnants of people, spaces, and memories – requiems for things lost.