Gregory Scheckler

This is beautiful music intended for deep listening and slow pondering, with long duration melodics and drones.

Long ago I learned of a vexing story - it may have been Sufi in origin, or maybe Zen - and it goes like this: A well-known music teacher sat along the edge of a campfire, holding his guitar. He strummed a note, and it reverberated warm and rich, filling the camp. He played the note again, and again, and again. One of the musician’s students felt irritated by the repetition, and became angry about practicing scales and melodies and complicated fingerings. The student wanted far more variety but the teacher kept on playing that one single note again and again. The student demanded to know why such a skilled musician as the teacher wasn’t playing an actual song. The teacher said, “When you find the perfect note, why play anything else?”

In response to that question of perfection - I think that music and art often arise out of the so-called imperfections, the chaos of collisions and collaborations and conversation and changes as they rise and fade. True perfection, then, isn’t about some distant idea of unchanging eternity. Maybe it’s about all the changes happening right now, some faster, some slower, some interrelated, all arising and fading together. In relationship to this, I often detuned my synthesizers to help find less traditional interactions. So, a simple experiment: how much music can you pull out of just one note, tuning and detuning, filtering and waving, pulling in and out of coherence?

No a.i. were used or harmed in the making of this music. Instrumentation includes field recordings and their making, eurorack modular synthesizers, electronic and electroacoustic percussion, voice, and other odd-n-ends. All tracks were performed, recorded, and mastered by Gregory Scheckler in the foothills of the Taconic and Green Mountains in the Berkshires of Massachusetts.