“A Roiling Edifice” concludes a cycle of recordings affectionately referred to as the “Frankie” Series, for its heavy use of the Brandnewnoise Frankie Box: a handheld recording device with delay, pitch modulation, and repetitive playback capabilities. After concentrating on the clarinet and bass clarinet for several years I was finding myself struggling to produce a music with the instrument that felt realized. One solution was to use space/environment to enhance the instrument through acoustic properties, but this restricted to site-specific realizations. Ensemble play certainly helped lessen the burden of sole content creator, but completely changed the resultant material, not to mention the logistics of getting several individuals together… My inadequacy complexes, conceptual ruts, and physical limitations were plaguing my relationship and association to an instrument that was deeply meaningful to me. I needed an economy of execution and flexibility for circumstances. In celebration of the opening of my friends’ interior design store, Honey & Ace, I purchased the Frankie Box and was intrigued by its potential to be incorporated into a set up with my clarinets that would allow for some time-based manipulation and the ability to sustain ideas while creating others simultaneously. Beginning with “Inattentive Support”, several themes are at play throughout the series which also includes “Barely Equipped” and “Actuality Manifest” and, now, “A Roiling Edifice”. Aside from an ongoing desire to work within restriction (in this case, using a particular gear set-up throughout these recordings), my want is often to create in real-time and (as a soloist) have a music that functions more as a spacial/dimensional experience rather than being experienced as a series of (sonic) actions from an individual. This lends itself to another theme and the connective tissue in the titling of these four recordings…

Inattentive Support, Barely Equipped, Actuality Manifest, and A Roiling Edifice, each one an acronym:

IS, BE, AM, ARE…

The word “Be” and three of its grammatical variants; Is, Am, and Are. “Be” possesses a multifaceted definition: “To exist, occur, take place, occupy a position in space, stay in the same place or condition, attend, come, go, visit, amount to, represent, signify, consist of, or constitute”. Improvising at its absolute purest exists as much in the present state as one can get (albeit with the cognitive strands of simultaneously perceiving of the past and anticipatory notions of future, but what’s HAPPENING is in the present) it becomes the moment, or is within it. These recordings were all improvised, no overdubbing or editing was done, all with this idea of “being” at the fore. Recorded January through March of 2020 in the studio of visual artists Sara Willadsen and Erica Jane Huntzinger, the majority of the pieces on these releases attempt to embody the space as well as help define it. Each sonic element is a texture, pattern, an aspect of spacial consideration, not unlike interior design. These works reflect a stasis I had been feeling and one the world was confronted with, but also looked to generate a stillness; creating a sense of flow and fluidity within a space rather that creating what feels like motion or a sense of moving forward through time. May these captured moments of a once present drift in and out of focus like consciousness and occupy whatever degree of attention they happen to at the time…


Frankie Series IV

Recorded January 25 & 29 • 2020



future fern

2021