oleander / oleanderboom
i started this in Summer 2000, when Carol was going to Indonesia for the second time and she wanted some more music to choreograph to. i put together three six-minute scores that shared a lot of similar sounds or neighborhoods of sounds as i like to say, and we called it Oleander since it was the latest title to permeate Carol's brain and it's a beautiful word. in the Fall i completed a 5 minute version called Oleanderboom for the Music & Language class taught by Morton Subotnick and Dick Hebdige that captured the essence of the three - using noise as rhythm and narrative, exploring extreme time expansion (which found its fulfillment in the epic TCEX), accompanied by traditional instruments in various simple rhythms. i used these recordings as the seed for the original score i made for Carol McDowell's piece Translation Project (2001), performed at Highways Performance Space by a group of 5 dancers and mixed live. i took the materials that i used for that show and tweaked them in ProTools for far too long. then in the usual fury i burned a CD and put it away for 6 months to let it bake. when i came back to it i still had a lot of the same confused directions to explore in it but also realized that it was good even as it was sloppy, kind of a validation of using a live mind when composing a millisecond at a time in ProTools.