Tony Buck - 26.12.10 (2020)

A note from Tony Buck

This piece is lifted from a multichannel video I made earlier this year in collaboration with Front Porch Productions for their online festival.

In the recent past I have made a bunch of short ‘virtual duo’ videos that were somehow more noise or dissonant free jazz oriented. On the occasion I wanted to make a piece that was both more substantial and more in keeping with the slowly evolving and somehow more ‘harmonious’ vibe of a Necks piece.

It was preconceived in a general sort of sense more than pre-composed. I had a pretty good idea of the kind of thing I wanted each instrument to play and how each part would develop in its own trajectory. I recorded each instrument without listening to the others, except in the case of the Kalimba/drumkit ‘groove’ in the last section. In the editing stage I tried to find smooth transitions from the different video angles of each take and additionally make connections with the other parts. It was more or less a kind of editing exercise in making the most of intended/unintended correlations.

In this piece I feel like I was drawing on the methods I use when arranging and overlaying parts in most of my music making practice over the last few years - whether that be the making of a solo recording, like the Room40 Unearth album or the way I work with my contributions to The Necks recording sessions or even the way I think about orchestrating percussive timbres, pulses and parts in the playing my instrument in general.

The piece is dedicated to my father, who passed away during the period I was working on this music.