seven at 77 - preorder Joel Mellin

As much as the phrase can be co-opted for indie pop music, Where it's At has been 'thinking global and acting local' for 21 years now.  I got involved in the early stages of WIAIWYA with my Miss Mary project when John approached the label I ran with my brother Jeff, 'Stereorrific Recordings' about a split release.  We'd then often split releases, Jerv in the UK, Stereorrific in the US. We've been through years together, with trans-atlantic pop releases and trans-atlantic rock and roll shows and most important - a host of friends.  I'm not sure either of us can retire on the proceeds from any of it, and WIAIWYA has outlasted Sterorrific/Waxfruit for sure, but it was never about that - it was about making music together, and in that way, we've always been there, you know, 'Where It's At' with Jerv.  Congrats on 21 years, John.  You're Where It's At and that's where we are.

Artist: Joel Mellin
Track: Be Here With Me
Album: Sevens Ceremony (Seven at 77)

"It's more painting than music."  


You're head is at the center of a sphere - at least seven feet in any direction. One voice appears, then others over time.  Sporadic at first, moving in disparate arcs around you, and yet, all together in one space.

There was a piece by Yoko that I read a few years that talked about pushing an elephant and changing our heads instead of changing the world. 'That we can do' she wrote. 

Compositionally, Be Here with Me melds contemporary notions of aleatoric and stochastic music with traditional, harmonic progressions studied for hundreds of years.Realized in a three dimensional ambisonic paradigm, a space is created for listening and reflection.

Written entirely in Java, the piece was designed for a custom 3D Ambisonics decoder and encoder  - placing the listener's head at the center of a listening sphere.  This piece could be decoded in a multi-speaker environment of 4, 8, or 16 speakers in various positions around the listener, but is decoded to stereo for this recording.  A melodic voice moves at a constant velocity around the listening sphere and harmonic voices move in slowly accelerating circles above and below the listener in various directions and and trajectories. 

The melodies are chosen at the start of each 7.7 minute section based on a pseudo-random function that considers musical key and the chord progression of each section.  The chord progression is chosen using an aleatoric process commonly referred to as a 'markov chain' - in which the probability of the next chord is determined by weighted percentages of possible 'next' chords of the current state.  In this respect, it has no memory.  These percentages were programmed using simple assumptions and understandings of common practice progressions dating back to the 16th century.  These chords are never voiced directly, though, as a mathematical distribution functions controls the timing and number of single voice events that occur for each of the 3 harmonizing voices.  The seemingly random voicing is each event itself choosing how to harmonize the melody in real-time. 

There's an additional nod to my interests in Asian music and cultures with the addition of an underlying drone and clearing bell.  The gong, as is common in Balinese music, signals both the end and the beginning of sections. . 

In a sense, it's music reflecting back on itself after years of 'progress'.