former began with a year’s collection of field recordings, spanning 2012 and 2013. these were recorded during passages of daily life, mostly in and around berlin, many at the studio or at home. these quotidian moments include occasional experiences of music and performance, from street market buskers to sound art exhibitions to my son exploring the studio’s detuned piano. i approached these recordings as intervals of experience, as sounds that revealed their value through unhewn textures and frank expressions. the work of composing former was largely an attempt to bring these experiences-in-sound into conversation without reducing them to a single surface or unified tone. to maintain a roughened multivocality seemed important; to hear a conversation in process, between elements in the world, of which i was one.

in order to both capture and expand upon this idea of sound as experience and process, i developed a new compositional technique for the production of former. i played back the finished tracks of the pieces in my studio, through monitor loudspeakers and simultaneously through noise-cancelling headphones. under these headphones i wore binaural microphones in my ears, through which i could record a combination of the headphone sound (switching between noise-cancelling mode and not), the loudspeaker sound, and the incidental sounds of the studio, the street, and my own activities. as i listened in the studio i moved around and tried to respond to the work unfolding around me, attempting a kind of live duo improvisation with the recorded work. this re-recorded element was then brought back into the composition, where i could mix it back into the final work at will. many of the shifts in tone, proximity, reverberation, even feedback are acoustic effects of this re-performance and re-recording process.

the original field recordings were digitally processed and edited, and the final work composed on the computer. this was done partly in krems, austria, during my artist residency at air krems, and finished in my studio in berlin. former includes recorded elements of the work of takeshi nishimoto and yukitomo hamasaki, pierre gerard, david papapostolou, luigi nono, nuri bilge ceylan, iñigo manglano-ovalle, the wandelweiser group, graham graydon, my students in the nyu berlin sound art studio class, and the palaoa acoustic observatory in the antarctic ocean. these were recorded in situ during live events or from environments in which the sound was an ongoing element. these function not so much as “samples” but rather as acoustic traces, pieces that have been transformed by memory, montage and computer processing.

the title refers to two senses of the word “former”. the first, former east refers to my neighborhood in berlin, prenzlauer berg, which had been part of east berlin during the city’s division. the second piece, former-and-longeron refers to the technique of ship and aircraft fuselage construction in which bands called formers encircle the empty volume of the craft, giving it its shape. i felt that both senses had a natural resonance with my experiences of the previous year, and the ways in which those experiences were materialized in sound.

andy graydon