Bang on a Can

bleed through is based on material that I had generated over the past year and a half that was waiting to find its way into a piece. The process of exploring the different parameters of music had led to a crisis--I did not know how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. I had the tools and materials to write music, but not the blueprint. It took the physical move of myself out of my existence in America to give me the perspective necessary to know how to reintegrate the musical elements I had purposefully and violently taken apart.

The title bleed through was ultimately chosen as a reference to a type of energy, and a type of memory. The multiple layers that exist in the piece flow and pulse like blood through a network of interlocked veins. The artistic quest for an understanding of contemporary and personal experience informs the piece on all levels, formal and emotional. Writing this piece was a battle to understand how interpretation of present experience is constructed from recurring memories of past events which overlap and coincide, or which are juxtaposed, or which coalesce into a new whole. The stronger the memory, the more it bleeds through into the present and influences our understanding of our current and past self.

-- Keeril Makan