Apartment Music 55

I had the great pleasure of performing at Hal McGee's Apartment Music 55 on August 9th, 2025!

In Hal's words:

Apartment Music is a series of performances of sound art, improvisation, and experimental & electronic music in Hal McGee’s apartment in Gainesville, Florida.

I have played a number of Apartment Performances starting in 2008. However, the last time was in 2018! I was long overdue to play and I had largely fallen out of the local noise and experimental music scene since then. I missed the kindness and camaraderie of that sweet little scene.

In April 2025, Tatsuya Nakatani posted a really cool little clip of himself playing an electric guitar with an EBow and a couple small singing bowls. Such an expressive and simple setup! I was super inspired and started dreaming of some way that I could expand on that idea. When Hal reached out to me to see if I was interested in performing, I jumped at the opportunity to develop this concept into a full piece.

To get excited to prep for a performance like this, I need more than an abstract idea or concept to build from – I need to connect the music to something deeply-felt. It wasn't hard to figure out what that should be.

This year has been one of the most challenging of my life. In February, my father passed away after years of poor health. Around the same time, my chronic back pain became quite debilitating and has greatly limited what I can do with my body. The pain has also had a profound impact my emotional life and mental capacity. My mother became severely depressed and my brother's health started suffering, too.

I knew that the music had to be connected to my family in some way. Also, it was essential that the music had to be a channel for my grieving process. My father's absence from my daily life is one of the hardest things that I have had to endure. The word "sadness" can't possibly describe my feelings. The overall feeling is one of profound wrongness. As if in February I stepped through a doorway and every person and every experience I have encountered since then is some surreal alternate-reality version of what I knew before. My work colleague who also lost his father describes the feeling as being "unmoored". I am a ship lost at sea.

Here are some pictures from the show:

Hal does an amazing job at documenting his concerts. Here is the video he recorded:

And for the gear nerds, I know you are out there ;]

Here is the signal path:

Guitar with heavy gauge pure nickel strings tuned DADFAD
You need steel or nickel strings for your EBow!

soundhole-pickup -> magus (rat clone) -> ambient (reverb) -> mixer

under-nut pickup -> preamp -> mixer

iphone -> mixer

mixer -> skysurfer (reverb) -> amp

The Skysurfer stayed on during the whole performance. It was pretty noisy and I will probably sell it.

Using the mixer, I would blend in different amounts of each pickup depending on the section of the piece.

I used the Magus as a colorful boost at the very end to achieve a little more cut.

The Ambient pedal was my main "effect" featured prominently throughout. Cheap and effective pedal! I needed a long, modulated reverb which this pedal delivered but I wish that the very end of the reverb tail didn't cut off so abruptly.

The iPhone had audio I extracted from a sweet video of my parents goofing around on a webcam many years ago. I pre-processed it through Hainbach's excellent Fluss and then further processed it using Logic and Soundtoys plugins.

Here were the parameters that I set for myself:

• Play the guitar
• Every sound should be caused by an action that I make in real-time
• No looper pedals
• Invest time in learning how to use the EBow effectively
• Figure out how to use a slide in an interesting way that doesn't sound corny
• Experiment with found objects
• Start with open jams
• Distill open jams into discrete sections with some pre-composed parts and some improvisational parts
• Create a framework that demands focus, concentration, and has a high probability of going wrong
• Embrace space and silence
• Get nervous
• Connect it all to my painful lived reality

Here's how it turned out:

The day of the show I felt overall OK. My back pain was at a manageable level and the lightweight gear and ergonomic setup that I created for myself made load-in, setup, and performance relatively pain free.

It was really sweet to get a chance to spend time with some folks who I have been seeing at gigs on and off since 2006 or so – Hal purposefully assembled a list of musicians who used to play together at his earliest gigs. Also got to meet a few new folks.

I was nervous going into my performance but I managed to stay calm and not rush my piece. I felt like my focus was solid and that the spaces and silences that I was using were projecting a palpable force into the room. Overall I felt pretty pleased with how it went and folks seemed to dig it.

When the video finally went up, I watched it on my phone before work. As the video ended, I started sobbing. Grateful for this opportunity to touch into something deep and real to get to share it with an attentive audience of kind and caring people.

What would I do differently?

Figure out how to make short and percussive sounds extend a little longer. Not sure if those translated live the way they felt when I was playing them. Maybe consider using some kind of granular delay?

I would also probably need to either use a mixer with EQ or spend more time processing my pre-recorded audio – I don't think that the ending worked quite how I wanted it to because the audio and guitar fought each other in the mix.

Looking forward to more Apartment Music shows to come!