Harmundum by DAC Crowell

This was something of an accident.

I had set out to examine slowing and blurring of a basic, mundane chordal progression across an extended time scale. I had no idea it was going to wind up being 56+ minutes in length, however. But while realizing the work, I apparently became so fascinated by the interaction of the ostinato patterns and the strange 'melt' of chord into chord that I lost track of the run-time while the recording process was going on, and at around 45 minutes in I finally glanced at the time on the monitor and realized that perhaps I should rein things in, since the original idea was to only spend 20-25 minutes on this.

I'm glad the accident happened, though. Upon listening to the playback (the track was actually cut in real-time, direct to stereo) I was transfixed by the events occuring as one chord shifted toward (not really TO) another. The time scale that had occured was actually just perfect to allow this to happen and for the listener to 'dive into' the chordal shifts. In truth, this work started my exploration of longer and longer time durations, and seeing how 'typical' musical language changes as time grows in a hyperscaled manner. If this were a 'typical' song, this progression would likely only last a few bars...maybe 20 seconds or so. "Harmundum", though, draws that interval of time out hundreds-fold, and unexpected things emerge.

Fact is, the only regret I have about "Harmundum" was that I failed to record a full-length broadcast of the work via shortwave in Winter, 2005. One would think that the no-fi quality of shortwave radio would've ruined the piece, but I actually thought it was an entirely new way of hearing the work, through the fading, static, drifting...it came out like little colorful fragments of sound, blown and tattered in the endless solar wind. Ah, well...I suppose it's still out there somewhere.

The album was originally released on Suilven Recordings as SUILVEN003 in 2004. The original cover art (a solarized and overlapped view of part of the realization sketch) was changed somewhat in 2018 for the album's Bandcamp reissue.

Composer/performer in electronic and electroacoustic media, concentrating on avant-garde ambient works. Studied with John Anthony Lennon, Salvatore Martirano and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Also known to do vaporwave and related sorts of sonic tampering. Born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, he currently resides and creates in Champaign, Illinois.

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