1 On Dit 41:04
"On Dit was created during the summer and autumn of 2002. These were my last months in the U.S. before relocating to Montreal. It was also a period of technological experimentation, as I had only recently acquired the programs with which On Dit was made. Conceptually, the piece had beenwith me for some time. The intention was to use a palette of both digital and organic sounds and to construct an extended track complete with individual though related "movements." I was aiming for a certain quietude, which I achieved in the first section, though as is often the case in art, the composition slowly developed of its own accord and became somewhat louder and more frenetic than anticipated. Perhaps the manifestation of an impending transition was escaping through the music."
This quote is the beginning of an essay that Tomas Phillips wrote about his work and that is included on the CD, as well as three of his paintings. For me On Dit constitutes a most interesting and personal choice of elements from the vocabulary of the electroacoustic music of the last decade, and combines them in a way that is both inventive and highly musical. The trajectory of the work is quite unpredictable, yet builds up to a coherent formal unity, and presents a perspective of progressing from the sometimes overly dominant paradigm of 'click and cut', 'glitch' and other purely abstract sound work towards a kind of work that embraces all the possibilities electronic tools offer today's composers.
Bernhard Günter
Tomas Phillips composed this piece in the last months before moving from his home town near the eastern seaboard of North Carolina to the city of Montreal, capturing something of the quiet life he led there, but also reflecting the inevitable tensions and excitement that must have defined the experience of leaving such a place behind. Using sounds from his environment and some newly acquired software, Phillips went to work at creating On Dit, an immersive, inventive piece where stillness and motion meet, a composition that works a strange magic on you as you listen, moving from one scene to the next through seamless transitions, building a slight tension and intensity, then falling into a quiet zone once again, mixing field recordings with electronic timbres, a minimalist's garden of sound. Found sounds are treated and manipulated, or they are left as they were recorded—the quiet sounds of chimes in the breeze. Minimal rhythms rise and fall; subtle gestures and combinations tickle the ears; a leitmotif of sound occurrences marks the progression of the piece at different intervals. On Dit is truly a journey of sound, a diary, a landscape, a self-portrait reflecting a particular moment in time, a location in space, a state of being. The CD also contains data files for viewing on your home computer — three paintings and an insightful essay on the composition of the piece, its themes and, more generally, on the experience of listening.
Incursion Music
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