Widower Pieces by Alex Carpenter

This is a collection of pieces I recorded from July to September of 2010 in preparation for the soundtrack for the short film "Widower" by Nick Hartanto and Sam Roden. The pieces were performed live on electric guitar through a network of amplifiers and delay pedals I call the "live audio delay system." This system, which I've been using in various incarnations since 2003, allows performed notes to be accumulated in "banks" of varying length and played back continuously (each through a distinct amplifier), providing material to build on.

I like to think of this performance activity as a kind of “tending,” in that it does not begin with a structural outcome in mind, but rather allows structure to evolve from the layering process itself. It is not the "willing-into-existence" of an already known thing, but a careful and reverent listening and responding, which ensures the thing grows from its own foundations, on a kind of cellular level.

Applying this approach to film scoring presented a unique difficulty: how does one arrive at specifically requested moods and gestures via a largely uncontrolled performance method? Any attempt to "will" a particular outcome into existence would obviously result in losing all the special possibilities the system offered, yet still the music needed to support the visual material. My solution was to keep recording until I stumbled into the "right" set of pieces that had all the elements needed for the final soundtrack.

This left me with a lot of material that was unsuitable for the film, but nonetheless interesting, which is what prompted the idea for this film music release with a difference. This album is not a "soundtrack" of "Widower", but a collection of pieces that emerged from these improvised sessions. It brings together full mixes of the main pieces used in the film ("Theme" and "Embalming") as well as mixes of some of the unused material ("Fainting Spell", "Embalming Prelude", and "Procession"). The collection concludes with "Widower Suite" - a consolidation of the film's chief musical moments.

--Alex Carpenter, December 2011

http://www.transparentmeans.net/
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Alex Carpenter is an Australian-born artist and researcher living in New York City. He has coordinated numerous group performance events as founder and director of the large-scale minimalist orchestra Music of Transparent Means, and continues to expand the application of his live audio and video delay systems in both recording and public performance.

transparentmeans.net