Bang on a Can

I was driving to the store, listening to an interview with a poet on the radio, and I heard a line from a poem and thought, Wow, I like that line. I'm really terrible at remembering word lines, but there was something about a bed and a moon and sweating. I had to park and didn't hear the whole interview either, so I'm not sure whether the line I heard and my title are at all the same, but it's a pretty title, right? It suggests intimacy. There's a lot of intimacy in my music. Everything on tape is performed by instrumentalists. I do all the string work and hire everybody else. And I always do close miking, which means the microphones are right up to the sound source. So I don't mean intimate as in small, because the sound is big, but it is very close to your ear. Most of the works that I do for live performance are like In Bed Where the Moon Was Sweating in that they use live performers and tape. I'm not interested in an amorphous, computer-type sound on tape. I'm interested in creating a real acoustic, physical sound. When you listen to the tape, at first you might think, Oh, this is done with a lot of percussion, a huge chorus, a huge wind section. But when you start thinking about it you realize this would be like 300 people on stage. The music physically couldn't be created live, there are just too many tracks. I work with over 100 tracks of sound. Besides the density, there are a lot of complex polyrhythms, and people can't conduct or play that. I started playing guitar and violin when I was a kid, and I played professionally, doing road gigs with rock bands, through most of my teens. In my early twenties, I realized what I wanted to do musically one can't do with just one instrument. I wanted to create a whole musical world, and I started to compose. Jazz and rock music, especially recently, have resurfaced as major influences in my work. When I was a wannabe hippie playing guitar, I remember listening to records really loud so the music filled the room and overwhelmed me. Now, because I'm working with hundreds of tracks, my music is also very overwhelming and dense. -Paul Dolden