About East40 - acceptance/defiance/resolve
My residency at East40, completed during the summer of 2024, occurred during a time of transition and transformation. After a series of personal and professional heartbreaks, I found myself needing the experience of interacting with the earth in the unique ways afforded to me through this residency.
Something that struck me about the East40 was how our human spirit infiltrated the grounds. I was enamored with the whimsy that exhibits itself throughout a quick walk through the land. I became fixated on how utility was forced upon the grounds. Does this land need to be anything more than it is? Do we need to make it useful or worthwhile, or is its existence justified by its simply being? I imagine some administrator saying, “We need to do something about the East40! We have all of this land, can’t we find a use for it all?”
Truly, the land asserts its own worth and simply exists. It is a 40-acre wedge of land between a sprawling college campus to the east and endless suburbia in every other direction. A place meant to take pause, to learn, to grow, to create, and to reflect.
When I began composing “East40 - acceptance/defiance/resolve,” I tried my best to act as the land. To accept what came to me and to live in it. Eschewing grand ideas of graphic scores (a staple of modern composition), audio treatments of nature sounds, and other ideas that kicked around in my head, I simply let the music come to me during several extended visits to the property.
The backbone of the work is a chord progression that was improvised while playing guitar in the East40’s classroom on a particularly muggy June day in 2024. After spending about 30 minutes improvising, I moved outside and decided that I would try to play music with the sounds I heard around me. I began a musical dialogue with birds overhead, with the sound of wind blowing through the field, and the distant sound of traffic on Route 22. These improvisations stuck with me…I had recorded them, but didn’t feel the need to listen back. I knew what material needed to be examined and expounded upon.
Accepting what I was creating was a huge part of this process. It is very easy, as any artist will tell you, to pick apart our work and allow negative talk to take over. Considering the personality I had already projected upon the land, I felt the strength to resist most of this negative talk and simply run with where the ideas took me. Chord progressions, meters, melodies, and form began to emerge. I ran with what was coming to me and chiseled away until the piece felt complete.
I recorded “East40…” in January of 2025 on both electric guitar and acoustic guitar. The characteristics of both instruments bring forth a slightly different look at the material. In my mind, the definitive version of the piece is the one marked “electro/acoustic,” which combines both recordings, layered on top of each other, and treated with digital effects. This is intended to give a glimpse of the worlds that may exist at the East40.
A second composition formed itself as I prepared the recordings for release. Again, considering our human imposition on the land of the East40, I pondered the land at night, what we don’t see, and the land that will exist long after we are gone, and the effects of climate change inevitably ravage our planet. For this, I wanted to create a recorded artifact of the piece that examined different viewpoints of the same material through post-production. These “negatives” are called “acceptance frozen over,” “cavern resolve,” and “defiance under water.” These are meditations on the human impact on the land, the digitization of our lives, and the unseen.
All music composed by Mike Lorenz
Recorded by Noah Flaherty in January 2025
Edited, mixed and mastered by Mike Lorenz
