SYNOPSIS OF THE PROJECT
Dirge Aside is the title of my final audio production project which will take the form of a C.D. comprised of seven to ten short musical pieces. A variegated coming together of mostly unconnected pieces, the C.D. will reflect a variety of styles of music and compositional processes that interest me, and a number of different sound sources and recording conditions/methods will be represented. The project will allow me to take the roles of recording engineer, musician, composer and matrix of my musical environment and explore them in diverse manner.

BACKGROUND/INTENT
In the spirit of post-modernity, my final audio production project will allow me to become a sonic doppelganger, fitting several different methods of production and composition into what offers itself as a coherent whole. This effect is the result of both my background and my intentions as here they are one in the same. With the project I intend to communicate the reality of my musical activities over the past several years, and to do so requires me to play the doppelganger as the requirements of recording and creating the different genres which my activities have included forces me to diversify the audio production methods with which I must familiarize myself.

The path towards the making of the project provides the content while furthering my development as an artist through the diverse production skills it summons.

TREATMENT
FORMAT - The project will be presented as MP3s on a CD-R.

AUDIO OVERVIEW - Among the pieces four different compositional methods will be represented: songwriting in a conventional sense, free improvisation, composition through arranging of samples on the digital audio technology and one or two of the pieces will be composed by someone other than myself, but I will record and edit their performance of their piece.

All of the pieces will be in a sense collaborative as even the pieces based on digital sampling composition will heavily incorporate the work of contributing musicians. The source of their contributions will also vary significantly. From recording their playing directly onto the editing software, to outside recording sessions which I was involved in, to mailed in recordings done specifically for this project, the sources will explore collaboration under a variety of conditions.

The instruments involved in the project are as follows: guitars (electric and acoustic), pianos (electric and acoustic), cello, flute, bagpipes, voice and computer. All of the lyrical content, which is isolated to one of the four modes of composition, was written by one of the contributors and as such I will not attempt to analyze the textual nature of their words or risk displacing the contributor's intensions by including them here on a non-musical/audio values level. I will also refrain from discussing genre here as I feel compositional process is more significant a consideration for me in the course of the project than personal identification, and though compositional process is inexorably connected with identity, as are my timbral choices which were another strong guide throughout the project, they are best left pondered by the subjective listener as I would prefer to believe that their conclusions would be as ambiguous as I feel the pieces are in relation to genre.

Identity figures in through genre in my strong aesthetic and political affinity for free music as well as my collaborators' for jazz and avant-classical music, which should be mentioned, but I believe the implications of this are closer to music theory in relation to aesthetics than they are to relying on any non-ambiguous cultural conventions and I do not feel I have appropriative in any problematic ways or that this project will have any effects on a significant socio-cultural level. I feel the technology and the process are the primary forces reflected in the project together with a sense of personal history in connection with place.

In regards to the collaborators, I have either worked extensively with them, and have grown as an artist directly because of them, or they share the conditions of my current audio development and as such reflect those conditions in my mind. Thus they provide connections to my recent background and reflect my position in the realm of musical expression as well as my aesthetics. All of the elements that make up the project are meant to express my conditions and the musical and aesthetic coherence I see in them, though the fact that they may end up juxtaposing will only be a measure of the distance from the subjective listener's realm of experience to mine.

The sounds will hopefully bridge certain gaps and share what I find interesting.

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