My flute technique is no better than it was in high school, but my musicianship is 1000% more realized, so the range of expression feels huge & unfettered by rules. My main stylistic hurdle is that the flute holds a narrow association in people’s minds: whimsical, classical, feminine, new age. But since I’m a drummer I’m like, what if the flute got pissed.
Thought Loop was an experiment in making the flute sound petty and sarcastic. One day I came home from an interaction where I had run myself down by thinking on behalf of everyone else, who seemed completely unbothered by thought at all, and I felt like a chump. I resurrected a 4-track tape loop I recorded in 2021 and layered everything else on top, trying to make it sound 1) passive-aggressive, and 2) self-mocking.
I dramatically detuned the flute by pulling the head out as far as I could, and used strong and imprecise attack as if throwing air from my body like punches. The snare part is a live recording I made by hauling my snare drum to Dean studio to record in a call booth. I thought marching-band-like percussion would elicit an ironic sense of discipline (i.e. repetitive thought patterns) and uncool-ness (i.e. the embarrassment of realizing you’re thinking more about something than everyone else).
The single art was inspired by an image I found in a children’s craft book at Anna’s Berlin apartment in 2020, Laurie Anderson’s Big Science, and the cyanotype kit Hadley got me for my birthday. It’s a polaroid self-portrait with drawn-on paper taped to my glasses, which is, fittingly, really embarrassing.
