Warm Waxing Wail is a piece designed for a solo performer: either a singer who plays the piano, or pianist who sings. As a result, the music has been composed with an eye to be as adaptable as possible to many different sorts of musicians. While a trained voice will inevitably execute certain sections of the work with more polish, a “rougher” vocal technique, it combined with real musicality, any create a particularly intimate, personal, and evocative performance. Performers with some jazz or popular music background may even be at an advantage here.

The basic material of Warm Waxing Wail was composed over one week in southern California, atop a small hill in Long Beach. Each day I composed a short one-minute piece, the entire group of which constitutes a sortof “California journal.” Upon returning to New England, these pieces were spliced, overlaid, and recombined with one another, rather like the effect of passage of time on series of memories. The sustained mood throughoutis dreamy, delicate, meditative, and gently passionate. – – – Robert Carl