On Geology

About On Geology

At the end of 2016 the electric guitar duo (h)artDrive found my piece In Ecclesia and started playing it around New York. I came out for one of the shows, and Giacomo Baldelli, one of the guitarists, asked me for a solo piece for his next record. We got together a couple months later at Spaceworks in Long Island City to try out some sounds and discovered we were both into ambient music and the idea of playing with loops of different lengths.

I visited the Museum of Natural History on the same trip, and was totally blown away by the cross section of a banded iron formation in their geology exhibit. It looked like liquid rock, and it made the enormous time scale that the earth operates on suddenly palpable.

It took the better part of the next year to figure out exactly what to do with all the material we’d come up with. The result was the piece Slow Earth, which Giacomo is premiering in September of 2018.

While making the mixes I realized that the piece worked very, very well, and felt very different, without the heavy live guitar part. It functioned more like an ambient work in the vein of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports. So a second, far mellower version was born. It’s so different that we decided a different name was in order, hence On Geology.