Codex
Drum Quartet Arcana
Codex is a pandemic-era drum quartet that brings together my love for numerology, codes/ciphers, 1970s New Age aesthetics, and hi-hats. Each movement explores different ways of encoding esoteric text to generate musical material. Throughout the The Essence Of, players “recite” time-stretched incantations on the hi-hats, approximating vocal formants by manipulating the cymbals’ timbres with the pedal and playing position. Other members of the quartet respond in turn with coded messages that generate slowly-evolving rhythmic material.
In the second movement, A Dialogue, the text of a conversation between the deity Hermes and his pupil is converted into binary digits, which determine the opening and closing of hi-hats and the tom patterns.
A Dialogue was realized remotely by four different drummers in four different states during the Sō Percussion Summer Institute 2020. The Essence Of was recorded at SōSI 2021.