Instrumentation: tenor saxophone, electric guitar (volume pedal, medium distortion, delay, and ring modulator), percussion (snare drum, floor tom, cymbal, cowbell, tambourine, ratchet, and vibraphone) piano, and fixed media (stereo Max patch)

Duration: 10’00”

Program Notes:

I grew up in Hamilton, Ohio, a pretty good sized town situated halfway between Cincinnati and Dayton. Through most of the 20th century, Hamilton was filled with factories where they made machinery, safes, paper, among others. Most of my life however, these factories have sat empty. Shattered windows, crumbling walls, piles of rubble. Something about these eerie post-industrial landscapes have always been so hauntingly beautiful to me; plants sprouting up from the cracks in concrete next to broken glass and tagged walls. Nature finding a way to crawl back despite our best efforts to destroy her. Through the Cracks is an exploration of this landscape, depicting a desolately decaying world with echoes of a noisy and industrial past.

Premiered and recorded by Hypercube as a part of the 2023 Klingler Electro-Acoustic Residency