Produced by David Kirkland Garner

Premiered and recorded by David Kirkland Garner at the University of South Carolina on October 9, 2024 

Recorded by Jeff Francis

Edited, mixed, and mastered by David Kirkland Garner

Cover Art by David Kirkland Garner

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CHRONODRIFT & NOCTURNE moves through eleven movements, alternating between two opposite states: tightly calculated process-based movements, and a release into something looser and more intuitive. The two sides are in dialogue across the album.

 

I call the underlying technique in this work “drifting.” In Reich’s phasing, the notes of the pattern are always moving ahead as a group, one pianist speeding up ever so slightly until they land on the next sixteenth note. I wanted to control each note separately. I split the beat into 56 or 60 equal parts, finer than usual time signatures allow, so one note might move ahead in the pulse while the others drift back. The piano holds the pulse steady in plain sixteenth notes without a click track. The electronics carry the drift, moving with a precision I could never manage by hand. Sometimes a note pulls so far around the beat that it wraps back to the front edge in a kind of contrapuntal rotation. The nocturnes are what I get after all that discipline. Slower, looser, built by ear instead of grid. Set against the drifting movements, they give the ear a break.

 

Throughout the work, a flawed, human performer holds a line against a machine that never slips. And, every so often amid the tension, the two find each other again.​

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