audio excerpt: MP3 format

I found Andre at his home studio, crawling around on the floor, twisting knobs and pushing buttons. Intriguing sounds poured out of the studio speakers, rich with nuance and detail. When he finished his improvisation (and got up from the floor) he showed me his discovery - he had wired together all his guitar pedals and effects processors into a feedback loop. There was no input to the processors - the internal noise of the system, amplified endlessly via the loop, was enough to produce an entire sonic world.

At the time, I had no access to a computer music studio, and the low budget technique was almost as exciting as the sounds it produced. I cobbled some pieces of equipment together into a small loop of my own, and set off composing. I soon realized that the sound produced by the loop is extremely context-dependent; the musical possibilities at each moment are limited by the state of the loop at the previous moment. As a result, Calyx is essentially a recording of a real-time "performance" of the loop, controlled by computer and refined over a period of months.

Premiered March 8, 1999, at Campbell Recital Hall, Stanford University.

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