Roger Mills is an ensemble-leader, a leading-edge thinker, a great musician– and most importantly for this release– one heckuva horn player. When I composed some generative Classical backdrops, I sent them to Roger. These tracks are what he created. I hope that you enjoy them as I do.
Artist Statement – Roger Mills
I met Thomas Park, albeit virtually, some years ago as a contributor to the Ambient Music mailing list run by hyperreal.org. We struck up an online friendship, exchanging ideas and thoughts about ambient music. Thomas began developing an algorithm that took snippets of audio to generate new sonic configurations, unrecognisable from their source. I was interested in the acousmatic concept of this, as I had been teaching a university sound design subject, and phenomenological concepts of reduced listening (écoute réduite), and the sound object (l’objet sonore) articulated by Pierre Schaeffer, were particularly front of mind.
In 2019, my internet music ensemble, Ethernet Orchestra, released our second album ‘Oceans between Sound’, and Thomas developed an interface that remixed the album in real-time, layered with images of the oceans and waterways that separate the geographically dispersed ensemble. Thomas later contributed a track created by the algorithm to our next album, ‘Oceans Reimagined’, a collection of remixes by invited artists. The possibilities of what the algorithm was capable of spruiked my interest in collaborating on this project, Eartrumpet & Mystified. Thomas emailed a series of stems created by his algorithm as inspiration for trumpet improvisations. I felt a synergy between the generative, reconfigured, composed music stems, and my practice as an improviser, reconfiguring a canon of notes, harmony and rhythm, developed over many years. As the project developed, I also started processing the output of the algorithm, and multitracked processed trumpet, field recordings and my own library of sounds to build each track. The result is an EP of four tracks that illustrate an experiment in human-algorithmic interaction that speaks to an ambient music aesthetic being regenerated and configured.
Roger Mills 27 January 2023.
https://archive.org/details/EartrumpetAndMystified
Filed under: Uncategorized
Treetrunk Records 