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​Samples and improvisations were recorded by Solís and I using six custom ceramic instruments that she built. Five of the instruments were variations on a hollow sphere with an additional clay ball inside which struck or rolled against the inner walls as we pivoted or shook the object. The sixth instrument was a ceramic chain which could be folded against itself or dragged along the ceramic tiles of the room.

 

I was interested in working with these instruments because the sounds they produced were complex, varied, and slightly unpredictable, while following the shapes of gestures and movements in a way that felt highly tactile and expressive. I had been working on a series of pieces exploring expressive microtiming in electronic music and felt these instruments could offer a different angle on the theme—focused more on phrase shape than individual percussive events, illustrating the expansion and contraction of time in relation to gestural movement, and grounding the work in an embodied relationship to physical materials.

I composed the piece by selecting segments of the improvisations which I felt had an appealing shape, then recorded additional improvisations in response and arranged a series of grid-based MIDI percussion clips based on samples from the instruments. As I constructed the piece, I pulled and stretched the MIDI clips in relation to the timing variations of the original recordings, and also sculpted their timing in dialogue or counterpoint to the rest of the arrangement. I intentionally blurred the line between the original improvisations and digital materials by using samples and timbre transfer techniques. This resulted in rolling, multi-layered percussion textures which pulled and stretched against one another, outlining a shifting, non-metric sense of percussive timing influenced by the continuous shapes of our arm movements while playing the instruments. The title “SLP” is a contraction of “slip” which describes both the sounds of the instruments and their movements.