more about ryo nakata and his label

misound – ’stanza di te’ review – slow flow rec

ryonkt – ‘four fragments’ review- small fish

in an attempt to document my half of a creative process, i plan to write about the production of each piece on a new album collaboration with ryo nakata aka ryonkt.

today i will talk about one piece that i sent to ryonkt for reprocessing, a track entitled ’scale’.
here is the original before reprocessing:

Tanner Menard ’scale’ unprocessed for Ryo Nakata collaboration

here i tried to explore the western concept of scale in a very basic way, while trying to relearn the technique for a piano physical model designed for composing with resonance and decay rather than with pitch and attack. the idea with all the pieces in this series was to explore the basics of music that i had learned as a child, and explore them in a child like way, as if i was exploring my most basic understanding of these concepts before any formal training or mental conditioning. in all of these works i used minimal repetitions of these simple musical concepts for the purpose of creating a field of resonance. therefore, the musical concepts became a sonic skeleton, or road map for a secondary aural emanation arising from the use of heavy sustain and an enormous virtual piano 30 feet in length. in most music, it is the attack, the pitch, the tone, the abstract concept of sound that is filtered by conditioning and education into our brains, and the decay, sustain, sound and timbre that are put by the wayside. the goal in these works is in a sense to reverse this trend. to bring the attack, pitch, tone into the background and bring the decay, sustain, sound and timbre into the foreground. here the pitch merely becomes a vehicle for the creation of this secondary sound world of pure resonance.

i was very pleased by ryonkt’s manipulations of this piece. like so many works by current japanese artists, ryonkt’s additions had a subtle strength that seems to grow naturally and organically out of the artificial piano resonance that i so carefully crafted.

Ryo Nakata + Tanner Menard ’scale’ with Ryonkt’s processing

it is a real treat to work with such a subtle artist. i am not exactly sure what ryo’s process is in manipulating my piano works but i love it. i can only explain it in purely aural terms, simply put, he seems to be adding layers of resonance which might have existed or do exist with in the original field. what is so genius about his approach, is that at once it is clearly a separate layer created by an artist with a vastly different voice, and yet there is a belonging and understanding that creates a single sonic entity.

when i sent this to ryo i had no idea what to expect. in fact, some four months went by before i ever heard from him. one day i woke up to seven amazing audio files waiting in my gmail inbox. now, probably another three months down the line i am taking the time to examine these works in depth and give them an extra layer of complexity.

let me know what direction you think these works should head by leaving a comment below. and by

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