elvistudio

asher - graceful degradation, ambient
artist's notes:
     these works started their lives as recordings of my piano onto
     an old, beat up tape using an old tape recorder. the piano I
     bought on the street in brooklyn for seventy five dollars. I
     was told it had been the piano in a local bar and was in quite
     a state of disrepair. over the year or so that I lived in my
     partment I grew quite attached to the black spinet with gold
     stickers spelling "steinwa" on its face. the cassette I found
     while cleaning out old offices in queens. it was among an
     abandoned collection of cassettes that someone left behind. I
     adopted them, giving them new life by layering field
     recordings and piano over led zeppelin and the police which i
     found on them. the tape recorder I found in a storeroom at
     work. no one cared when I took it home and it always sat next
     to the piano with a cassette ready. one of the cassettes I
     ended up using had been recorded onto so many times that it
     became worn out and never played back my recordings the same
     way.


     after working with this cassette for a while i had filled
     it up, even recording over some of my own recordings. at this
     point I started creating compositions using this material,
     with samples of various lengths looped and played against each
     other, yielding unexpected results. I came across the concept
     of graceful degradation while reading a book by richard
     restak. I realized that the idea fit in very well with the
     work I was doing. memories are recorded in our brains and
     surface whenever they are triggered; but each memory is
     blurred through the process of recollection. This blurring
     process occurs as memories are recalled and observed in the
     present, altering the original version. There are many
     references to this concept within the compositional process
     and final results, and perhaps more which I haven't
     discovered. The first layer I encountered was within the
     cassette. Each time I played a section of the tape the sounds
     were altered and placed in a new context. The next layer was
     in the studio working with the sounds, sampling sections of
     the tape and creating the compositions. as each sample plays
     its part in the piece, it is altered through its relationship
     with the sounds of the other samples. Another layer exists
     while listening, as each person develops an individual
     relationship with the piece, and the sounds are placed in the
     context of their experience.

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