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.

I've always enjoyed collections of songs or musical pieces that weave a leitmotif throughout the progression of the entire album, whether it's up front and center or just discreetly referenced here and there, but I've also historically been crap at keeping track of them, so I figured I'd get recommendations. Do you know what I'm talking about? If so, what are your favorite modern albums that feature or hide a recurring short musical phrase? Videogame and film soundtracks are not only welcome but encouraged. Link if it's available online!

Examples:

• Katamari Damacy (a single 14 note motif)
• Pink Floyd - The Wall (multiple motifs) (warning: nazis)
• Aquaria (9 note motif, the Verse)
• The Dear Hunter (multiple motifs, such as the 10-note Pimp and Priest motif)

The "album problem" is, of course, the fact that our music listening habits have changed over the past decade and the value of a well-thought-out album is not nearly what it once was. This is in large part due to the fact that it's easy for people to create playlists with a billion different songs to choose from, recommendation algorithms, "Discovery Weekly" playlists, and whatever else the streaming services can throw at us.

I may not speak for all of us, but I've personally not been able to fully consume a new album for quite a while now, finding that I gravitate toward a few songs/singles that get dumped into a separate playlist. I don't like this and I miss the days that I would discover deep cuts in the back of an album that I listened to ad nauseum.

I present to you the "Six Disc Changer" playlist. The rules are simple:

1. Create a new playlist in Spotify, Tidal, or your chosen platform. Call it "Six Disc Changer"
2. Add six FULL albums to the playlist
3. Force yourself to listen to the playlist -- maybe not exclusively -- but a fair amount. Imagine you're driving around in your 2002 Honda Civic and the only music available to you is what you've got in your CD changer.
4. Any time you want to add a new album, you must remove an old album. You should only have six CDs loaded up at any time.

If you want to take the concept a few steps further...

5. Any time you remove a CD, add it to a separate playlist called "CD Catalogue".
6. Any time you want to add a new CD to the catalogue, you must "purchase" it with an "allowance" of your choosing. I'm going with 1 new album per week. You can swap out albums from your Catalogue playlist freely, but new albums must be "purchased." This will simulate scarcity, which was a large part of what drove us to listen to albums over and over again.

But... why?

My goal is to get back to listening to full albums and truly taking them in. The best way I can think of to do that is to simulate the way things used to be. By using a streaming service instead of, say, just going back to CDs or records, you get the benefits of convenience, Last.fm, easy Bluetooth, etc.

As for what's in my CD changer right now, I've got:

1. Sufjan Stevens - Javelin
2. The Antlers - Need Nothing
3. Talking Heads - Speaking in Tongues
4. Refused - The Shape of Punk to Come
5. George Harrison - Living in the Material World
6. Bob Moses - Battle Lines

Is it dumb? Probably. It's been fun so far and my music listening experience has been much more focused.

TLDR/Warning: this might be a tedious read. But I'm curious if I could have gone about rating my albums better.

I tend to simply either favourite an album or not. The idea of giving albums and tracks marks out of five stars seems tedious, difficult to match to how I feel and just doesn't match how my head works. But my collection has grown over the decades and I've been bed bound a lot lately, so I'm trying to organise/categorise based on my feelings towards the albums rather than genre. I'm also hoping to rejuvenate my old interest in music (playing in a band and recording for a living took the shine off of casual listening for me). I thought it would be an interesting experiment to try out, so I rated songs from over 50 albums.

I came up with a rigid and hopefully balanced definition for each rating:

• 1 star - Dislike. I hope I never hear this song again (but I'll keep it purely because it's part of the album)
• 2 stars - Neutral. It doesn't annoy me, but it's too generic to be interesting
• 3 stars - Sometimes this song hits the spot.
• 4 stars - This song usually hits the spot.
• 5 stars - This song always hits the spot.

Then I rate the album out of five stars based on the average of the song ratings. The result is that no albums got 5 stars, a seven got 4 stars, the vast majority of albums are rated at 3 or 2 stars. Even among the 3-star albums, some I like much more than others depending on whether they contain mostly consistent 3-star songs or half 4-star songs and half 2-star songs.

I wonder if the lack of 5-star albums is because of the definitions I gave each of the 1-5-star possibilities. For example, I don't know if any song "always hits the spot". Or maybe it's just that I'm not as into my music as I used to be.

Anyway, I thought maybe people interested in music and data might have thoughts on going about this differently. It's worth asking before I do the next 1,000 albums :) Maybe you'd define each of the 5 stars differently. Any takers?

Edit: thanks to everyone for reading all this and commenting their thoughts. I have a system I'm happy with now, but always happy to continue to chat with fellow (and reluctant) pedants about this.