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2012 - 10 year Anniversary Edition

by GrantCutler

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1.
Devotion 07:47
2.
Attainment 02:02
3.
Talk To Me 03:50
4.
Dreamer 08:32
5.
6.
7.
Mountain Top 12:39
8.
9.
10.
11.
Bonus_Orb 16:44
12.
13.
14.
15.
Bonus_Portal 20:11

about

2012 - A Decade On

Listening to 2012 in 2021, I am charmed by the spirit and sincerity of what could easily be considered a fairly raw and rugged experiment in new-age aesthetics. At the time of creation I had little experience with electronic instruments, but I had just “discovered” the music of Vangelis, Michael Stearns, and Alice Coltrane. I was aroused by the utopian and futurist ideals presented in their music; the soaring spaces, the droning, shifting layers, the time they allowed themselves and their audiences - they were offering an expanded consciousness revealed through musical trance-meditation. A planetary unfolding indeed! At the time, I was overly steeped in a pop-music production methodology and eager to break free of the normative conventions inherent to that space. I don’t think I had yet been exposed to the work of Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Pauline Oliveros, or any of the mid-century minimalists working in early electronic music, but, through film and file-sharing, I had heard Tangerine Dream and Philip Glass; the music bloomed in my mind, I was deeply energized.

Now, reviewing this music a decade later, I am struck by the meditative qualities evident in much of the music, especially unexpected coming from someone so mannered and anxious. I had read some Zen literature but had always had a difficult time keeping concentration, my interior life was an illusive stranger whom I desperately wanted to know. The persistent arpeggiator present in the music helped to keep my attention pulsing forward, but I remember yearning to hold space for open-time, playing with depth rather than width - imagining rolling landscapes unfolding into boundless horizons. The music was a retreat, a withdrawing room. I was charged by the repeating patterns I could create by layering simple motifs: the rhythms I was able to unleash, the drive, the effective trance triggered by ceaselessly echoing reflections, the thrilling indeterminacy of improvisation. I was preparing a vehicle to move toward a meditative state that I was likely unable to pilot. Perhaps unprepared but certainly determined, I carved out the pathways that I needed to travel using tools that were newly accessible.

These songs are all performed live. There is no overdubbing or editing. I remember sitting cross legged on the floor of my tiny bedroom, busted-up equipment sprawled before me and improvising into the deep night, elated with my ability to create and explore such a rich sonic landscape without accompaniment. I would lose myself in this process, expanding into the architecture I was erecting. I remember drinking absinthe that summer. Bicycling from bar-shows to backyard parties and back home again, laying, headphoned, spinning on the floor, letting synthesized forms wander and wash over me, blanketed in that warm, timeless space only accessible through the mystical combination of substance, music, and sweat.

Almost all of the equipment I used to create the songs on 2012 was gifted, borrowed or stolen. The Korg Poly 800ii, which produced the bulk of the sound on the record, I borrowed from my junior high music department when I was 15. Nearly 25 years later it is still on loan. The cassette machine to which I recorded belonged to my grandparents’, discarded decades before in favor of a CD player. The silver plastic tape deck was on its last legs, wobbly and inconsistent in its recordings. It stopped working completely shortly after this project was finished and was regrettably pitched. My friend Mike had loaned me a strange oscillator unit meant for testing video equipment. It sounded great running through a delay pedal. Our joke was that it sounded like “space whales.” The many arpeggios needed to create this vintage soundscape were programmed using a Roland JX3P, which I had acquired when I learned that the entirety of the Terminator soundtrack was produced using the same model. There were no computers used to make this music, which seems like a success in itself, or quaint even, compared with how dominated by “the box” my music-making life has since become.

I am proud of my younger self for taking the risk of releasing this music. It is simple, somewhat naive, and reliant on some heavy new-age tropes. But it is personal, honest, a true reflection of the conditions of those few years of my life. I was eager to expand my musical abilities, I had yet to title myself a composer, which seemed far too rigid, or stuffy, and I had never released instrumental music - it had, up until then, always felt incomplete. You may assume an album titled 2012 to be fixated on some supposed end of the world, but for me it was instead a truly transitional moment, a real-life gateway into a new age. I was using this music to break free from patterns in my life that were no longer serving me, and to create new ones.

Listening back to 2012 I am delighted. It is a fantasy piece. It is a complete world of my own design: cosmic spaces filled with the tones and textures that helped me transcend my own rigid reality. I now believe that it was during this period that I was able to realize my attraction to developing spatial concepts through music and sound, rather than adhering to narrative forms, as I was accustomed to in traditional songwriting. I was more interested in fostering an experience; facilitating a set and setting more than promoting some comfortable, and consumable music product. It was a powerful evolution and I still travel in similar directions in my current work. The album version of 2012 was released by Innova recordings in 2011, anticipating the end of the world shortly thereafter. But, it turns out that worlds end all the time. Change is inevitable. And yet, it seems that, without fail, new worlds are steadily and gracefully revealed.

This deluxe 10 year anniversary edition of 2012 contains bonus material unearthed from my archive - nearly an hour of it, recorded during the same period, using the same equipment - a second cassette tape of experimental compositions - the truant twin. Please enjoy.

credits

released November 9, 2021

Originally released on Innova Recordings

Recorded by Grant Cutler
Mastered by Pete Lyman & Grant Cutler

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GrantCutler Brooklyn, New York

Grant Cutler is a composer, and interdisciplinary artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York.

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