Anywhere Everywhere: 38 loops for Loop38
Anywhere Everywhere was commissioned by the Houston-based ensemble Loop38 and premiered on Facebook Live and Youtube July 19, 2020. For this project, I gathered over 100 individual recording files into a twenty-minute long work and paired these with over 300 photographs I had taken over my three years living in Houston.
Program Note
I pitched the idea of doing a piece of 38 loops in July of 2019, having no real idea what kind of shape that would take. A musical loop is just a segment of material that can repeat endlessly, and I thought about what structures in our lives play out like this. Routines and schedules are persistent and regular. Our relationship with others, ourselves, and larger structures of time are vaguer but cyclical, moving to clear and dissolving back into vagueness.
The title of the piece is a reference to a line from Bryan Washington's Bayou Diaries column in an article where he describes Houston as "...a space where language is manipulated and contorted and pulled and borrowed and split in two. It would sound like nothing else, which is to say it would sound like everywhere and anywhere else."
The significance of this for me lies in the way it reveals a physicality of language, which is something I play with throughout the piece. The movement titles are fragments from my notebooks and scenes that stuck with me. Like Loop #11 called "Everybody's Air Conditioner Running Simultaneously," which is the very particular experience of walking through a forest of condo units in July and you hear a thousand separate HVAC systems clicking on and buzzing like giant cicadas.