A Conversation

DeForrest Brown Jr.

So what's the idea behind all of this. I mean, I assume you're into sampling and process music and all.

Brandon Locher

Sure, I'm into all kinds of music. Mostly 80% of the sounds on the album are organic sounds from field-recordings that I made. Recording a drum circle that happened in the streets, recording friends playing orchestral instruments, etc. I created this "fake" ensemble and tried to develop this "created" space. The album is called It Happens Outside because I feel like the music exists inside of this created environment. I'm interested in space and how much distance is between all of these sampled and recorded objects. I'd build up sections and tracks and then work with musicians one on one and have them just improve to naturally capture that "first thought best thought".

DB

I can't image anyone talking about music without thinking of it in terms of space -- both physically and contextually.

BL

I live in Western PA and it's pretty quiet, ya know?

DB

Right. I'm from Alabama, so I understand on some level.

BL

Yeah totally, and I only mention this because of my sonic relationship to Manhattan. When I'm staying with my sister on East 11th St. sometimes I'll put field-recording microphones in the windows and then close them. I run the sound into a stereo and it perfectly amplifies all sounds outside. It's an interesting separation from being inside and clearly hearing everything on the other side of all these walls. I like recording sound sometimes from far away and then just making it louder. I like trying to hear the quality of the air. But with living in Western PA or Alabama, nearly every single day there are moments when outside is just as quiet and sparse as your lamp lit living room. The sound of the paddle fan becomes more intense and you can only hear one single bird. Ya know? I find that perception interesting. I produced this entire album inside a small bedroom. The vision was always to make it exist outside.

DB

Right. It reminds me a lot of Ackerman's Rendezvous with Anna. All music is, is a collision of space... infinite digression. That's pretty cool, though.

BL

I want to keep exploring and developing my physical and sound work with these ideas in mind. I want to record brass bands and orchestras playing outdoors in parks with those bandstands that project echo. I want to record an ensemble of drummers playing alongside a highway with multiple microphones traveling away in consistent intervals from the drums and deep into the valley.

DB

Very scenic. Would you be attempting to develop some new alien sound or just extracting its immanence.

BL

Just the mundane, that natural transcendence. I love pop music. I feel the root of my harmonic structures are founded in pop-theory, but I enjoy making the hook a sample of a plastic cup falling over in the wind. I'm clearly not making club music, and I feel most people wouldn't even consider this electronica, but I feel like it's connected because it's all electro-composed. I'm interested in developing this organic sonic frame that is manipulated and slowly stretched into time.

DB

Right, right. Have you ever looked into dromoscopy? Dance music only affects me insofar as the beat marks a point of permutation or digression, Ala, Zeno's paradox.

BL

Yeah, in the end it's all one big illusion.

DB

Of course and it's ontology is based solely on our having built it in spite of that. I've always seen music as being an abstraction of the real, a hyper textual map of the infra.

BL

Nice thoughts.