Electroacoustic Music
Bright, Common
Paul Scriver; Bright, Common 9’31”
The piece evolved out of an interest in working with “swarms” of sounds; a kind of acoustic granulation where hundreds of discreet envelopes of sound coalesce to make a single gesture with its own perceivable shape and apparent tendency.
Working with this specific sound source wasn’t planned, but once I had a good recording of the complex gesture created by an entire box of nails bouncing on a slate floor, the interest in using the gesture as– is …and the pleasure of dismantling it for new gestures became an engrossing process.
Though 3-inch nails were arbitrarily chosen as the sound source for this piece, there is still room to ponder steel framing nails and their purpose and role in our lives. These ubiquitous, common objects pin our dwellings together and thousands of them anchor the trimmed and reformed fibers of once great forests together into a thicket of houses and commercial buildings we call home.
The initial recording of the piece came at the end of the pandemic, a time the mental health of my family my workmates and my students was top of my mind. These simple and indispensible tools of construction could serve perhaps as an allegory …or at least a nod to all the interior rebuilding and restructuring brought on by the global COVID-19 pandemic of 2022-23.
Dread Loops
Dread Loops -Paul Scriver 7’ 13” (2025). Personal recordings, some musical instruments and a love affair with sound.
I Was enchanted by the sounds I heard in yesterday’s dress rehearsal. At 10 pm last night, inspired by the aural memory of my student’s pieces, I dove into composing a sound offering with my own answer to the background noise of our current political moment. Doom Loops is a response from the heart to the feelings of dread that many feel in the face of current events. It is a shout out to creativity and the power of art and memory. Politics is impermanent, but the cave paintings at Lascaux still speak to us over the countless forgotten generations, the petty and devastating strife and conflict that we humans bring upon ourselves as part of our very nature. Music is a balm. The humorless face of xenophobia is no match.
There were no rules in making this piece… perhaps just one idea: “why not?”
Golden Gate Redux
“Golden Gate Redux” is composed mostly of field recordings made on the night of the Chinese New Year’s parade in San Francisco in 2006. Most of the sounds for the piece were gathered in San Francisco’s China Town. On the same night, one kilometer away, I recorded the Wave Organ on the shore of San Francisco Bay the edge of California’s “Golden Gate.”
Wilpena Crow – excerpt
The material for “Wilpena Crow” was recorded in Australia in the Flinders mountain range a few hundred kilometers from Adelaide. Wilpena Pound is a dish-shaped plateau that rises above the surrounding topology. In the late 1800s the area was used as a natural sheep pen or pound-thus the name. Today it is set aside for the native flora and fauna. On the day that we visited, the crows were having a particularly erudite conversation and I was lucky enough to capture it on mini disc.
Incidental (Lac Marie Claire) – excerpt
Transcribed Space Aria for Water Faucet
The “transcribed space” of the title refers to the fact that all of the field recordings used in this piece were gathered within the halls and practice rooms and on the front lawn of the Mills Music building. The “aria” musically documents the charming decay of the plumbing in the men’s bathroom.
I recorded this piece in the spring of 2006 using a home-made Jecklin Disc and a pair of custom designed omni condenser mics made by Scott Morrison.
F.L.E.M.A
This piece came out of a collaboration with sculptor Rainey Straus. Rainey asked me to design an sound installation that would compliment her latex sculptures. Her work invites participants to get tactile with it, many of her sculptures are designed to fit in the palm of the hand. We landed on the idea of using the sounds of sexual release as the source for the audio. The installation was a multi-channel, multi-speaker affair, this is a merely a stereo representation.
You can read the review of Rainey’s show as it appeared in Sculpture Magazine here.