(Composing means: building an instrument)

- Helmut Lachenmann, Musik als Existentielle Erfahrung, Josef Häusler, 2004

The works on the album, Ortodromia were created exclusively with the programming language, Supercollider. Named after othodromic distance, the distance between two points on a circle, and thus the formula used to measure distance between two locations on the earth´s surface, the works on Ortodromia pay tribute to the many destinations I encountered in the fruitful period after leaving my home city of New York, where I was improvising and new music bassist, to embark on a study of both acoustic and electronic music in Europe, focusing on the connections between sampling and algorithmic composition.

The pieces span an experimental time from 2017 to 2020, when I took lessons in the Music Informatics Department of the University of Music in Karlsruhe, worked as student assistant at the ZKM Karlsruhe (Center for Art and New Media), studied with former IRCAM director Marco Stroppa in Stuttgart, and received a Master of Arts in Computer Music from the Institute for Electronic Music and Acoustics at the University in Graz.

Often with nothing more than a laptop and an airplane tray table, each work on Ortodromia is an electronic sketch, wherein I absorb the various lessons I was gaining in electronic music, sound synthesis, and music programming. Often created apart from my course work, I would dive into my coding program and attack the concepts of computer music in the spirit of a musician. The result of programmed instruments and algorithms - whether through spectral sculpting, L-systems, FM-Modulators, physically modelled strings, or sine wave controlled samplers - this is a collection of miniatures in which the designing of my sounds through algortihmic means, and the building of my instruments have became as much a creative, and as much of an expressive act, as the music itself.