Notes on “At Home”
In 2020, I was living just six blocks from Elmhurst Hospital in Jackson Heights, Queens, widely considered to be the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. The day-to-day life of my wife and me were upended in on March 12 when New York City, for all intents and purposes, shut down. In the coming weeks, I necessarily shifted my teaching online, and my wife, a bassoonist, had received word that all of her work for the next several months had evaporated. We rarely left our apartment, and the excursions that we did make into the outside world to gather supplies were accompanied by a certain degree of anxiety.
“At Home” is a four hour snap-shot of a typical day for us during this time. The piece is a structured improvisation for electronics using sounds captured from the circuitry of the household appliances that we use every day (refrigerator, computer, cell phone, MIDI keyboard, etc.). The sounds of these devices were captured through inductive transducers and contact microphones, amplified, and then processed through a variety of guitar pedals, Max/MSP, Logic Pro, and a Moog Mother 32 before being output through OBS as a stereo mix with video and streamed live on YouTube. The result is series of drones that slowly evolve, generating textures of increasing complexity. This piece was conceived as part of a collaborative project with composers/sound artists Miguel Frasconi, Stephan Moore, and Scott Smallwood. Headphones or external speakers are recommended for listening.