TLDR; I made an electroacoustic album based on artwork, poetry, and soundscapes in Portland, OR, USA. Inspired by ambient electronica and impressionist piano, CYLCE is a dark journey through nature and urban environments.

Bandcamp Link: https://nickalus.bandcamp.com/album/cycle

CYCLE is a project of mine that had an unusual life span (at least for myself). Originally, CYCLE was a sound installment commissioned for a gallery hosted by Open Haus in Portland, OR in collaboration with visual artist Jon Hwong and poet TKTK in a very strange turn of events. Over the past two years it has morphed into an audiovisual experience (I guess that would be the word for it???) using motivic development, creative coding (NO AI WHATSOEVER), and digital degradation.

In celebration of the physical release (and my first physical release as an artist), I plan to spend the next couple of weeks (as long as the mods are okay with these posts) discussing different aspects of the project in hopes of starting a conversation about other musicians’ practices, thoughts, or critiques. I have included a list of topics I plan on covering in future posts at the bottom of this one.

Context
The project started in 2024 (feels like yesterday) while working on my own gallery DEAD WORLD THEORY. A few months out from the premiere, I was introduced to Keith, a local poet, through my co-producer Jon. The three of us talked about their upcoming gallery hosted in the neighborhood. Jon was creating a collection of artwork exploring natural form within technology and Keith was premiering a new chapbook and giving a reading of selected works.

This was a collision of multiple niche interests of mine. Technology and nature have always been something of interest in my work since joining an electroacoustic ensemble during college. And before then, I was writing weird concert music that was interested in the idea of non-musical sounds (think: hypnotist/New York school of contemporary music), and specifically setting poetry and common speech to music (similar to work such as Jóhann Jóhannsson’s “IBM 1401 - A User's Manual”).

As you can see, the synchronicity of this project was insane. I needed to be in it.

I immediately pitched the idea to the other artists: I’ll make a soundtrack for the gallery that combines nature and technology, and the poet and I could perform an impromptu lieder of his work. Both artists loved the idea and took it to the producer of the event. With a little negotiation, it was decided. I was on the bill and even invited to speak on a panel discussion they were holding that evening to discuss my own upcoming project.
The event was a great success. We had a nice turnout and I had a chance to talk with some phenomenal artists that attended the event.

Inspiration
As mentioned above, this project was a perfect storm of my influences and niche interests. I’ll break the project into two parts. Sorry you can't hear the last part (should’ve been there).

Nature and Technology: The Soundtrack
I have always been the person to challenge a rule, not because I want to break it, but because I want to understand it. Naturally, as a pianist studying composition and performance with a wicked resistance to authority, I became interested in the avant-garde of music. This new fascination started with the usual suspects: Ives, Cage, Monk, and Schoenberg. But it quickly led to the modern approach of this idea such as noise, harsh ambient, industrial, etc.

This turn of events led to joining an electroacoustic ensemble where we utilized traditional instruments with technology to create shows, galleries, and sound installations. I immediately felt the shift in my peers:

Was I a pianist or was I a DJ? Was I a composer or a producer? Was this music or was this art (or neither)?

I began to obsess over this question. Where is this line between electronic and acoustic? Where is the end of nature and the start of technology? What is the line between music and art? If you are familiar with music history I am sure you know this is a pointless question that has been argued for centuries in either direction under the conversation of programmatic and absolute music. CYCLE is a culmination of my interested in ecoacoustics, technology, urban development, rural preservation, and the psychoacoustic effects of noise.

The Impromptu Lieder
The second half of the performance was an impromptu lied with Keith’s poetry set as the libretto. This was my second cycle of lieder as a composer. The first being a song cycle for Piano and Mezzo Soprano which used T. S. Eliot's “Cycle of Preludes” as the libretto. The preludes were traditionally set using Western notation and assigning pitches to the libretto. I wanted to do something different for this one.

In my journey of the opium dens of contemporary music and the avant-garde (circa 2018), I had discovered the Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. The piece was titled IBM 1401 - A User’s Manual, an opera that used a printer’s user manual as the libretto. Jóhannsson correlated the user’s manual with childhood memories of his father who was a salesman for IBM. I would not consider myself a printer enthusiast, but this work was striking. This took the programmatic style of impressionist lieder but worked from something that would be considered wholly technical and categorically “Not Art”. But, now the silly manual printed on cheap paper n’est pas une pipe.

I wanted to emulate the “Treachery of Image” in a sonic medium. However, the poetry I was working with is ART. So, rather than subverting the source material I decided to subvert the performance aspect. Rather than prescribing singing to the text, it would use common speech. I worked with Keith to transcribe the natural rhythm of his collection of poems. This allowed the rhythm of the poetry to be the pulse of the music.

Doubling down on programmatic vs absolute, I worked closely with Keith to understand the meaning of his work. I kept seeing the recurrence of phases (or cycles) of life, nature, grief, love, and healing. The work had hope, but hope that was sustained through a hostile world, fighting against the downward pull of pessimism. I also asked my poor poet to destroy their own work by telling me one word. This singular word would become the “narrative motif” of each piece.

I decided to work with impressionist aesthetics for two reasons: extended harmony and programmatic composition. Firstly, the growing class of piano-composers during this era such as Rachmaninoff and Debussy were a huge influence on me as a Pianist. Secondly, the “narrative motif” from Keith would be used to decide the sonic motifs. One specific example of this is using planing fourths upward rather than using a Picardy third for moments that reflect sadness changing to happiness.

Below is a list of the topics I plan on covering in the next couple of weeks:

Location specific

Portland: Selected Soundscapes

Associated Memories: Places and the Past

Song Cycle

Modulation without Keys

Timbral Motifs

Song Cycle/Story Structure

Ecoacoustics

Nature/Transition/Urban

Audio to Video

Audio to Video: Motifs

If there is something you are particularly interested in or something you don’t see on the list please leave a comment and I’ll add it in! Additionally, this entire post is meant to be a discussion for musicians and fans of music to talk, so, please leave your thoughts below for myself or other people to jump in.

Yesterday the family was driving home from dinner and ...Ready for it? came up in the playlist:

In the middle of the night, in my dreams, you should see the things we do

So in the vein of A Speculative List of Jay-Z's 99 Problems, and other than the boring, obvious answer, what do you suppose they get up to in her dreams?

I was really taken by the sound of Laufey’s Madwoman and am looking for the older music which inspired her.

The internet, however, has not been helpful. Between citing “The Great American Soundbook”¹ as her inspiration, or declaring its “clearly” bossa nova², i’m really lost. One person said “60s lounge,” which seemed promising³ but searching that brings a ton of AI-generated slop-and-slop-byproducts.

Is there a better term for what she’s referencing? Specific artists? Specific regions even?

1. which doesn’t sound the same to me at all
2. which no the fuck it is not, i, a brazilian, say
3. another person said “70s lounge”

For me, the biggest is definitely Modern Baseball.

To set the scene, it's 2016, I was in high school, and a girl I was friends with told me about this band Modern Baseball. I liked them a lot, but I wasn't quite at my peak emo phase (that would come about a year later during my freshman year in college lol), so I didn't get super into them or anything. Anyways, a few months after that, MoBo came through our city on tour and that girl and one of our other friends literally offered to pay for my ticket to the concert if I DDed for them... and I said no.

Fast forward like 7 months and Modern Baseball goes on hiatus in early 2017, a hiatus that continues to this day, though they played a few one-off shows throughout 2017. Anyways, fall 2017 comes around and I listened to Modern Baseball more and realized I really liked them... but they're on hiatus and I missed my chance to see them!

Anyways, I mostly made this thread because the fact that I turned down going to that concert is something I still think about from time-to-time and I wish I went, but I'd love to hear if anyone else has similar stories or just stories of bands you wish you could have seen.