Most of Audnoyz Project Vol 4 was completed over an eight year period. The why it took so long you will read about below.
 
Much has been said of art coming from pain and suffering. Also, it’s been documented that anger, depression, anxiety and stress are all a vice grip on creativity.  It has also been said frequently enough that life sometimes gets in the way.


A few of these pieces are aural forms, manifest in textures, tones and sonic that leapt from the mind cinema at play in my head.  The result of catharsis triggered by emotional context inextricably tied to the interconnectedness of being.


Beyond the vicissitudes that beget a few of these tracks, there was the untimely gradual decline and 2018 loss of Patty Barkas.  It took me years to get into a better place emotionally in which to work with Patty’s voice again. That being the big reason why many of these tracks sat for as long as eight years.
 
Back in 2012 while recording and sampling Patty’s voice for the 2013 Audnoyz Project Vol 3 album, Patty said to me, “always use my voice as an instrument.”  Little did I know then the weight of those words… 
 
A paradox among other phenomena involving Patty and this album is the track, In the Clouds. I wrote the piece at 3AM in tears, after an arresting day of coping with the near constant cognitive distortions of a family member’s agitated Aspergerian state. 
 
Patty, always so supportive of my parenting journey, provided the embodiment of my emotions in her vocal arrangement; putting forward my concern for my child at the time, who was so dysfunctional and simply not aware of the dissonant wake created; head in the clouds.  That voice. Now literally, in the clouds…  All said, this song has lingered until now.   
 
Director David Lynch said, “when I think of cinema, it’s an aggregate of visuals, dialogue, sounds, music coming together to speak its own language.”  I think of composing with textures the same way. A visual feeling from a picture in my mind created by an emotional situation manifests in tensions and textures.  The saying “the world is as you are,” in that everyone comes up with their own sense of things, perceptions.
 
I think of many of these tracks as absolute music. In that, just like “instrumental music composed purely as music, and not intended to represent or illustrate something else” by definition. So too was the process in how many of these tracks came about.  In that, the vocalese as performed by Patty were not rehearsed. She simply listened and the vowels, words, the sounds just came out. A bastardization of definition surely to upset the ethnomusicologist purists. However, it is pure music, absolutely.
 
ART ANGEL
What’s turns out to be an artful and existential play on words where the poignancy and the power of Patty’s voice literally fell into place posthumously as Art Angel.

The track is essentially a mashup of two songs, Tell Me More and Some Day (Tell Me More Some Day- an angelic joke) that just came together in such a way that begged further development and inclusion on this project. One evening I was in my studio and I got the sense to mashup two previously unreleased tracks titled Tell Me More and Some day.  While perusing a backup drive I came across a cryptically labeled file which I discovered to be Patty’s vocal outtakes from the Tell Me More session from years earlier.  At that moment I flew the track into the project.

It was a wow moment that made the hair stand on the back of my neck. Where I dropped the vocals in the project is pretty much where they stand today in Art Angel. What's more, it’s in the same key. I had no idea it was going to work out this way. I acknowledged it all as a grand gesture from above. 

Furthering the creative cascade, I heard composer/violinist Angie Shyr’s adept instrumental voice in the developing track.  So, when Angie, a close friend of Patty's, was in town December of 2019, we recorded. And, like with Patty’s vocalese, Angie just played in the moment, no rehearsal. Just music. 

I finally put it all together in my Covid February 2021.  The Tell Me More track has been sitting pretty much done since 2016.  I just mixed in Angie’s spontaneously captured violin and a few sonic twists to complete what stands as today’s arrangement. 

Out of the Mist is a composition that, like In the Clouds, came from a difficult place. The textures and roller coaster that is this track translates the mind cinema in my head and projects it into aural form. The track relays the dissonance, tensions and disruption touching on an area where many suffer.  The intensity of treating a loved one with medication for mental illness, then further exacerbated by navigating the arresting behavior of paradoxical side effects.