HAZY HEART PUMP I’m obsessed with what happens when known quantities are placed in unfamiliar settings. When our comfort is confronted with a whole new range of disquieting associations. When sounds you recognize are used in a different way, when your viewpoint changes, when the boundaries that defined your thinking are exposed. Hazy Heart Pump is music about context and origin, familiarity and displacement. It’s about the thing that made the thing that’s in front of you, the bones that you don’t see. The six pieces on this album are born from collaboration with friends, and from a desire to understand and challenge the boundaries of their relationship with their own instruments and with the music they have loved. This music is a response to conversations about the reasons we make music, and our place as artists. The title comes from the name of a particular string playing technique heard on the first and last tracks. It’s a faint gesture, pitches and contour barely heard over the white noise created by a bow playing on a string that’s almost fully (but not entirely) deadened. Violinist MikiSophia Cloud and I found this sound after months of searching for the perfect texture to communicate a soulful pulse in the distance. Miki coined it a hazy heart pump, a term which rings true for me in many contexts. What happens when you hear two familiar songs at the same time, or when something you thought was beautiful lies underneath a few layers of dirt and grime? When a rhythm is disembodied from its source? When the associative powers of reference and abstraction are pit against each other? What happens when musical blocks are arranged in a lineup — stripped of all adornments so all parts can be subject to scrutiny? Can repetition be a form of learning and unlearning?
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