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Bowling Alone

by Matt Carlson

supported by
Alex Tripp
Alex Tripp thumbnail
Alex Tripp Carlson has always been great at making complex synthesis sound hand-played. But there's so much more in reach now with these new rules, so much more flexibility. Something like Apology to Satan can wind up finding some kind of almost straightforward footing and spend its runtime having a blast stumbling thru it, but then Balding Dog comes right off like it's throwing out orbs to illuminate 4th dimensional intenstinesque hallways, so many coiled paths within paths. It's quite a wonderful range! Favorite track: Balding Dog.
Wade T
Wade T thumbnail
Wade T honestly, a bit of a mess but it has fun moments. copped mostly for the title alone!
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Balding Dog 05:31
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about

Bowling Alone started with a few rules:

1. Track everything totally dry.
2. Play all the parts by hand.
3. Use Linnstrument as controller.
4. Don't record to computer.
5. No more than 8 tracks in a session.

I wanted to try and break myself out of some default patterns I normally fall into. I wanted it to sound loose and free and have an improvisatory, jazz-like quality. I wanted to allow the music to be a bit sloppy; to not fix things that sounded like "mistakes", etc. I wanted there to be rhythmic sections but no metronome or grid so the parts would stumble around drunkenly. I wanted them to breathe and have some temporal push-and-pull, coming in and out of alignment. I wanted the music to have a feeling of "Beginner's Mind" or "Idiot Glee".

The title is from a book by political scientist Robert Putnam. I haven't read the book; I saw him on PBS talking about it some years ago. But its arguments reflected some of the themes and ideas that were coming up for me while working on the music. The book is about the decline of participation in IRL social/community organizations in the U.S., and he uses the collapse of bowling leagues as an index of this broader phenomenon. I couldn't help but think about this in relation to music, perhaps humanity's most quintessentially social and communal art form. More and more it's become an activity that atomized individuals do on their own, like me making this tape! But mainly I've just always thought it was a funny name for a record.

Thanks to Greg Davis for mastering.

credits

released March 23, 2022

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about

Matt Carlson Portland, Oregon

I'm interested in music's capacity to articulate ideas that cannot be reduced to or translated into another form or medium.

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