Composer’s Note:

In my electronic music, I often manipulate recordings using granular synthesis in a way not originally intended. The original concept behind granular synthesis involves “clouds” of sound “grains,” each grain only milliseconds in duration. I use grains of tens of seconds in duration, reading through samples of acoustic instruments performing melodic lines. Multiple streams of grains overlap and can be thought of as windows slowly moving along a melodic line, the musical material in each window looping back on itself, gradually progressing along the melodic path. The speed and size and direction of each window is different, producing a unique kind of polyphony based on a single melodic line. Katabasis works out a purely instrumental realization of this synthesis approach, without computer processing.