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softshoeballet
recorded late 1999 to early 2000 carroll gardens, brooklyn, new york Definitely the turning-point piece of my fledgling musical life, softshoeballet emerged as a concept for me shortly after moving to Brooklyn on June 13, 1999. At the time, I was holding out hope for "making it" as a singer-songwriter. Softshoeballet was going to be a series of songs, with lyrics, etc. By the onset of Autumn, I was almost broke, still sleeping on the couch of Jason Schoch and Apryl Hand, and realized that there was no way I could make a living for myself in New York with my handful of mediocre songs. At one point, I sat down and consciously decided to give up on music altogether. Somehow, this decision freed me in a way that I still don't fully comprehend. Softshoeballet became something else, and as Jason began introducing me to the works of some of New York's many composers (most prominently Morton Feldman), I began to see the music as a "composition." The structure of softshoeballet is really more of a collage than a composition. It consists of many field recordings, made on the minidisc recorder my wife (then girlfriend) bought me for my birthday, as well as some melodies played on guitar and keyboard (my temperamental Korg DSS-1). Most of the keyboard parts were made from glitches in the sampling process (it was Korg's first, and for a long time only, sampling keyboard, ca. 1984), so they will never again be duplicated in all likelihood. The thing that distinguishes softshoeballet for me as my first "composition" is that I mapped the entire piece out before and during the recording process. I used a dry erase board, and labeled section with the names I gave to separate melodies or samples. This piece will probably always be an ethical problem for me, though, as some of the best musical parts (the accordion at the end of part one in particular) were subway musicians whom I secretly recorded.
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all content copyright 2003 nathan bibb unless otherwise indicated |