https://willmasonmusic.com Will Mason Music Thu, 04 Apr 2024 12:07:34 +0000 https://willmasonmusic.com en https://willmasonmusic.com/desktop-splash Mon, 28 Nov 2022 03:35:39 +0000 Will Mason Music https://willmasonmusic.com/desktop-splash “Experimental yet still catchy”—New York Times“Mixes composition and improvisation, decorum and din”—Boston Globe “Mason uses microtonality to bring new colours to jazz’s tonal palette, opening up a world of possibilities.” —The Wire“Effortless in its ability to hop from exquisite avant-jazz-leaning passages, head-snapping, odd time-signature drum-led patterns and wild fills to profound surveys into tones and drones.” —Treble Magazine“Draws upon art and poetry for a transportive listening experience.”—I Care If You Listen “Jittery, manic, and restless”—Bandcamp Daily https://willmasonmusic.com/Music-1 Fri, 25 Nov 2022 19:04:08 +0000 Will Mason Music https://willmasonmusic.com/Music-1 https://willmasonmusic.com/Will-Mason-Quartet-Hemlocks-Peacocks Thu, 04 Apr 2024 12:07:34 +0000 Will Mason Music https://willmasonmusic.com/Will-Mason-Quartet-Hemlocks-Peacocks <img width="4000" height="5483" width_o="4000" height_o="5483" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/834b1c7d258ee944edbd2c9b7936b3653f6a65c5369fc57d629ea238698a54d7/will-mason-quartet-photo-credit-colleen-morgan.jpg" data-mid="213002664" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/834b1c7d258ee944edbd2c9b7936b3653f6a65c5369fc57d629ea238698a54d7/will-mason-quartet-photo-credit-colleen-morgan.jpg" /> photo credit Colleen Morgan Anna Webber - Tenor SaxophoneDaniel Fisher-Lochhead - Alto SaxophonedeVon Russell Gray - retuned keyboardsWill Mason - drums, compositionsExpansive microtonal chamber-jazz recorded in a large resonant chapel in New England. The music is inspired by La Monte Young’s epic composition “The Well Tuned Piano,” as well as by modernist works by painter Joan Mitchell and poet Wallace Stevens. “An unsettling and revelatory work, a sort of “alternate universe” chamber jazz album.” — Chris Ingalls, PopMatters“The harmonies at the start of “Twilight” reveal another tonal language, dark and enveloping...There’s a restraint at work, a gentleness of timbre, even when the improvisation heats up and a groove starts to kick in, as on “Turned in the Fire.” Mason leads skillfully from the drum kit, his mode of expression rooted in jazz.”— David Adler, Jazz Times“The seven-movement composition is a captivating piece of work, by turns hypnotic, explosive, and pensively dirge-like. And as mellow as it may frequently be, the unsettling qualities of its unfamiliar harmonies make it something like the antithesis of “ambient jazz”—not mood music, but something pricklier and more restive, perfectly keyed to a moment where contemplation feels united with the need to gather strength for what’s coming.” — Philip Sherburne, Futurism Restated“His own interests veer toward microtonality and free jazz, and everything I’ve heard from has triangulated between those two pursuits and his double-billed cap as composer/drummer...I can’t get enough of the sound and the shifting interplay all across the album, and all four musicians are convincingly locked in and super sharp.” — Peter Margasak, Nowhere Street“Draws upon art and poetry for a transportive listening experience”— Connie Li, I Care If You Listen “Driving rhythms are tilted off their axis by the retuned instruments. The results are tense and atmospheric...Mason uses microtonality to bring new colours to jazz’s tonal palette, opening up a world of possibilities.” —Stewart Smith, The Wire “Mason is a thoughtful and deliberate composer and performer whose efforts serve to stake out new ground in the creative music continuum. The result is a rigorous intellectual and artistic statement.” — Mike Borella, Avant Music News“Will Mason set his sights on microtonality in a jazz setting, and the ever-curious drummer, composer and bandleader comes away with another compelling treatise on an unorthodox musical idea.” — S. Victor Aaron, Something Else!“On the album opener ‘Hemlocks’ we are greeted with something slinkily and at times queasily seductive as Mason’s shakers and silt percussion becomes a riverbed, over which Anna Webber, Danny Fisher-Lochhead and deVon Russell Gray play a series of drones and short phrases from the grandfather clock melodies of Gray’s keys” — Christopher Laws, CulturedarmHemlocks, Peacocks by Will Mason Quartet “Hemlocks, Peacocks” is a multi-movement composition by Will Mason, for a quartet of alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, retuned keyboards, and drums. Mason’s music has always been characterized by the free intermingling of genres, and by an interest in microtonal pitch resources. His releases for his two-guitar, two-soprano, two-drum set rock band Happy Place made regular use of quarter-tone tunings, split across the two guitarists. But microtonal tunings pose special challenges for keyboard instruments: a 24-tone scale mapped onto the keyboard would mean that a pianist would have to reach the uncomfortable span of a minor 9th just to produce something that sounds like a perfect fifth. “I wanted to write music where all the instruments could feel fully at ease exploring these just intonation harmonies,” said Mason. “For the saxophones that might be a matter of learning some novel fingerings and embouchure changes, but for the keyboard it requires making some choices and trade-offs that really impact the kinds of composing and improvising available.” Mason’s exploration of LaMonte Young’s tuning system from his epic 1974 work “The Well-Tuned Piano” began because of Young’s elegant solution to mapping just intonation onto the piano. Young’s 12-note scale omits the fifth harmonic, resulting in an absence of justly-tuned major (5:4) and minor (6:5) thirds. One way of approaching the resulting scale is as a pentatonic scale with several shadings available of each pitch; another would be to construct a scale out of the septimal major (9:7, 35 cents wider than an equal-tempered major third) and minor (7:6, 33 cents narrower than an equal-tempered minor third) thirds. Young’s keyboard layout makes both approaches fairly intuitive; some familiar hand shapes, like the perfect fifth or octave, typically sound like a perfect fifth or octave. By contrast, a span of a minor 9th might sound beautifully consonant, and a major second might produce shrill beating. There are some oblique quotations of Young’s composition in Mason’s piece, but it’s the fluidity and improvisational spirit of “The Well-Tuned Piano” that first endeared Mason to the work. More than anything else, this high degree of pre-compositional care toward performance is the thread that unites Mason’s composition with Young’s. In “Hemlocks, Peacocks” the just intonation tuning system of Young’s “Well Tuned Piano” is set at two pitch levels on two separate keyboards, one rooted on C and the other on 436hz (a slightly flat A). This allows for the use of the 5/4 just major third, which Young’s tuning system deliberately omitted. But it also allows for an array of clusters and shadings of pitches. Especially in the improvisational context of much of this music, this lends the keyboard a flexibility and expressivity that is not normally available to performers. “Hemlocks, Peacocks” was written specifically for the group of performers assembled here: Anna Webber, Daniel Fisher-Lochhead, and deVon Russell Gray. Webber’s compositional work has encompassed just intonation tuning systems, as in her band “Shimmer Wince.” Fisher-Lochhead is a longtime collaborator with Mason, having played on his 2015 album “Beams of the Huge Night.” Gray is a polyglot musician, who works as a free jazz pianist, composer of contemporary music, and performs with the hip hop group Heiruspecs. In other words, everyone in the band is a composer-performer with omnivorous musical tastes. The album not only showcases the skills of its seasoned musicians, but also the acoustics of the cavernous chapel in Norton, Massachusetts where the album was recorded. The keyboards are modeled on the sound of the Fender Rhodes—an instrument that might cheekily be called microtonal no matter what its tuning system. The characteristic bark and bright beating of overtones that define that instrument are amplified and mutated by the reflections and reverberations of the chapel, all painstakingly captured by engineer Joseph Branciforte. “Hemlocks, Peacocks” draws programmatic inspiration from the Joan Mitchell painting “Hemlock,” (1956) and from the Wallace Stevens poem “Domination of Black,” (1916) which inspired Mitchell. The Stevens poem obsessively traces and retraces a series of images, many of them evocative of death: poison hemlock, darkness, celestial bodies, all punctuated by the cries of peacocks, traditionally symbols of divinity and immortality. Mitchell’s painting is a flurry of bold emerald-green and black brush strokes against a faded background. Each stroke bends downward, as though freighted by snow. Flashes of azure and red punctuate the painting, evocative of Stevens’ peacocks. Mason’s composition obliquely traces themes common to all three of the works which inspired it: an oscillation between repetition and perseveration on the one hand, expansive stillness on the other. Opening track “Hemlocks” is entirely through-composed, built around shadings and transpositions of a trilled 63:64 septimal comma (the interval between a justly-intoned natural seventh and an equal-tempered minor 7th). “The Fallen Leaves Repeating Themselves” opens with a shifting sax duet that transitions from equal temperament to just intonation, before a melancholy just intonation melody. After an alto saxophone solo from Fisher-Lochhead, a strong and declamatory climax gradually loses steam. “Twilight” is structured around dense clustered chords in the keyboard whose pitches die out in irregular and unexpected ways; shadings of the blues appear and vanish in the murk. “Turned in the Fire,” which begins with a solo from Webber, loops a small series of chord progressions inspired by material from Young’s original composition, but expands and contracts them across a shifting series of meters. “Hymn,” a duet between Gray and Mason, riffs on three just intonation harmonizations of a sacred harp melody. “Planets” begins with a noisy improvised trio between Webber, Fisher-Lochhead, and Mason, before Gray enters with a quasi-canon of perfect fifths juxtaposed across the C and A436hz keyboards. The final movement, “Peacocks,” sets a gentle contrapuntal melody in the keyboard against an insistent repeating saxophone line, which spirals out into a cloud of just intonation harmonies, and then into noise, and then into the slow fade of the drums, marching steadfastly into silence. https://willmasonmusic.com/Happy-Place-Tendrils Thu, 08 Oct 2020 18:30:35 +0000 Will Mason Music https://willmasonmusic.com/Happy-Place-Tendrils Tendrils by Happy Place"Mason’s latest opus builds on his band’s 2016 debut. This time around, in addition to the two-drummer, two-guitar attack — with select strings tuned to microtonal intervals — the bandleader has added a pair of vocalists. That expanded ensemble sound has only deepened the range of Mason’s writing. On the new album’s opening piece, “illuminations,” the singers at first execute parts that echo the quarter-tone dissonances between the guitars; in the final minutes, some of the more traditionally melodic vocal lines give the track a mournful, indie-rock glamour. "—Seth Colter Walls, New York Times"Album of the year"—Avant Music News"Despite its art-song qualities, which are enjoyable on their own, this album also has enough percussive whomp and guitar scorch to be worth playing at wall-cracking volume. It’s one of the most fascinating records of 2020; don’t miss out."—Burning Ambulance <img width="5000" height="3333" width_o="5000" height_o="3333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9fc501917dbd788d666a9cde9cdbf3e84f6a92b8d14dc084f674cb811f0acef2/DSC_9796_5000.jpeg" data-mid="160146501" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9fc501917dbd788d666a9cde9cdbf3e84f6a92b8d14dc084f674cb811f0acef2/DSC_9796_5000.jpeg" /> (l-to-r: dan lippel, andrew smiley, will mason, kate gentile, gelsey bell, charlotte mundy. photo credit Bryan Sargent) Press Release: Happy Place is a NYC-based band of two singers, two guitarists, and two drummers, performing music composed by bandleader and drummer Will Mason.Tendrils is the follow-up to their debut album Northfield, which was praised by Bandcamp Daily as “jittery, manic, and restless,” and by the New York Times for “succeed[ing] at fusing experimental rock and chamber music.”Tendrils expands on themes from the first album: it is a tense and disquieting sound world marked by microtonally retuned guitars; skittering, irregular meters; and crystalline vocal lines.The band weaves a strange, surreal fabric, and the performances are virtuosic without feeling sanitized. The music is suffused with nervousness and panic. It is a reflection of an era defined by anxiety, instability, despair; and of efforts to excavate fragile moments of beauty from the muck.The band’s line-up comprises vocalists Elaine Lachica (New York Collegium, Early Music New York) and Charlotte Mundy (TAK ensemble, Ekmeles); guitarists Andrew Smiley (Empyrean Atlas, Will Mason Ensemble) and Dan Lippel (International Contemporary Ensemble); and drummer Kate Gentile (Phalanx Ambassadors, Miles Okazaki) in addition to Mason on drums and electronics.On album opener “Illuminations”, a bracing introduction finds the guitars tuned in 1/4-tones over an irregular tom-tom beat. After a frenetic solo from guitarist Andrew Smiley, vocalists Lachica and Mundy conclude with a forlorn, lilting melody. On “Tarnish,” Mundy sings of desiring decomposition. At 5:20, she gasps in a high register: “I want to be dried grass / thirsty and underfoot / I am of the mud / I gift my thorny fists to the dirt.” The song concludes with Mundy shouting “admire! admire!” until subsumed by clangorous guitars.Title track “Tendrils” finds the band hypnotically vamping over a microtonally tuned organ, exploring so-called “neutral intervals”--the space between a minor third and a major third, for instance. Smiley’s guitar, tuned to quarter tones, and Lippel’s guitar, tuned in just intonation, add clouds of pitches and gestures that are by turns sickly and beautiful. A drum solo from Gentile segues into the ritualistic, phasing “Having, Climbing.”On “Grain,” a call-and-response chord progression fires off erratically. Mundy sings melancholically: “I know it’s to keep me out of those gray banks / out of that cold / where that sweetness comes and goes / I am well.” A guitar solo from Smiley leads into a shattering, wordless climax: an exultant dance in drifting meters. “Invocations part 1” begins with quadruple-tracked Mundy in duet with Mason on synthesizer. Mundy frantically repeats a series of short, stuttering phrases—”I am like a leaf,” or “Traveling and I”—and, separately, sings as part of a descending major-key chord progression, but often voiced in grating minor 9ths. Gradually the synths swell and the spoken voice is reduced to percussive, shivering phrases. “Invocations part 2” preserves the minor 9ths in the vocals from Lachica and Mundy, but sets them against unpredictable, lush harmonies from the rest of the band.Album closer “Rapture” begins inside of a blender: an odd-meter, rapidly repeating unison pattern in the guitars and drums, occasionally doubled by distorted vocals. In “Rapture part 2” dueling solos from Lippel and Smiley preface a hocketing, mechanical drum groove, with overlapping but asynchronous harmonies from the guitars and singers. After a slippery, disorienting coda, four D major chords ring out calmly, like bells tolling.The album was recorded at Degraw Sound and Tiny Panther Recording in Brooklyn New York, and mixed by Seth Manchester (Battles, Lingua Ignota, The Body) at Machines With Magnets in Pawtucket Rhode Island. It was mastered by Carl Saff. <img width="3677" height="5516" width_o="3677" height_o="5516" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f7b3442192115f147c4450a105764c95f1e961a18b2f329c798506a1c450e70c/Happy-Place-2-photo-credit-Bryan-Sargent_3677.jpeg" data-mid="160146436" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f7b3442192115f147c4450a105764c95f1e961a18b2f329c798506a1c450e70c/Happy-Place-2-photo-credit-Bryan-Sargent_3677.jpeg" /> (l-to-r: dan lippel, andrew smiley, kate gentile, charlotte mundy, gelsey bell, will mason. photo credit Bryan Sargent) Live at the Bug Jar, Rochester NY: Live at Roulette, Brooklyn NY: https://willmasonmusic.com/Happy-Place-Northfield Mon, 10 Aug 2015 19:11:08 +0000 Will Mason Music https://willmasonmusic.com/Happy-Place-Northfield Northfield by Happy Place Reviews: "The group Happy Place succeeds at fusing experimental rock and chamber music by keeping all the required instrumental skills in-house. The two-guitar, two-drummer quartet can handle the quick changes in composer-percussionist Will Mason’s writing...The cathartic two-guitar attack has the feel of avant-rock, while the astringent harmony recalls experiments by Charles Ives." —Seth Colter Walls, New York Times"The music is jittery, manic, and restless. You can forget any hope for tranquility here. It’s difficult to think of any prior recording that so accurately recreates in sonic terms both the uncomfortable physical act of tossing and turning awake in bed, as well as the scrambled and panicky thought processes that come with being incapable of turning off your mind."—Bandcamp Daily review of Happy Place - "Northfield" "From the deep mind of heavy-hitting, octopus-armed drummer and bandleader eclectic Will Mason, the mad professors in Happy Place spew a bottomless pit of serrated riffs and dueling beat salvos that ostensibly are never on repeat...Mason anchored its scientific and taut mind-fuckery through the lens of freaked-out contemporary classical, extreme-prog and noise-metal with nods to the slow-building symphonic dissonant histrionics of Glenn Branca." —Brad Cohan, New York Observer "The pieces are built from small, repetitive melodic cells and dissonant almost-harmonies, with the double drums battering out martial rhythms that drive the guitarists forward with something between dispassion and cruelty. It’s a clattering, clanging music that has the raw-nerve feeling of sleeplessness and tension. At the same time, it rises to a crescendo—the 13-minute “Rapture!”—that’s intensely beautiful." — Phil Freeman, Burning Ambulance "Structurally tight, Happy Place boils with tension." —Avant Music News "A student of music theory with a special interest in the French spectralists, Mason may namecheck the likes of Ligeti, Grisey, and Haas, but he’s also a killer drummer who keeps good company, so all you need is a pair of working ears to appreciate these inventively grooving, infectiously knotty compositions." —Eric McDowell, Dusted Magazine Interview with ATTN: Magazine "As the debut album from Happy Place, another band led by this outward-minded drummer, composer and bandleader, Northfield is an outlet for the music of Mason that’s more frayed, directly emotional and diffused." —Something Else! "It takes careful planning for a band so tight to sound so loose...[Mason] sounds more liberated than ever, free to play what he wants, with whom he wants, as long as he wants." —A Closer Listen Press Release: <img width="3350" height="2345" width_o="3350" height_o="2345" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9545efda8b9bdbd04a8e9fb0759c804092c5309cc239018fbaf884601d770fa8/Happy-Place-1-cropped.jpeg" data-mid="38980299" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9545efda8b9bdbd04a8e9fb0759c804092c5309cc239018fbaf884601d770fa8/Happy-Place-1-cropped.jpeg" /> (pictured left to right: Andrew Smiley, Will Mason, Austin Vaughn, Will Chapin. Photo by Bryan Sargent) Happy Place is a NYC-based band of two drum sets and two guitarists playing a through-composed suite of avant-garde music inspired equally by noise metal and contemporary classical music. Written by new music composer and percussionist Will Mason during a state of extreme and protracted sleep deprivation brought on by anxiety, the music on their debut album Northfield is an exploration and celebration of the altered states of consciousness that asceticism elicits. It is about experiencing exultation through absence. It is about ecstasy through privation. In 2014, Mason started being unable to sleep more than four hours a night. “After about four months I started to hallucinate,” he said. “I was literally out of my mind. It was an agonizing and ascetic place to be.” Mason was eventually inspired to use that experience as a window into altered and even elevated states of consciousness. He started to think about how suffering and asceticism were prerequisites for a certain kind of peak musical experience.&nbsp;He spent his sleepless hours writing music in his kitchen: little figures, short snippets, long processes. Their length became meaningless in the agonizing non-moments of restlessness, when time feels unfamiliar, feels changed. The suite of songs that resulted bring to mind cutting-edge rock artists like Lightning Bolt, Tyondai Braxton, and Zs as well as contemporary concert music giants like Giacinto Scelsi, Gyorgi Ligeti, and Gérard Grisey. The album threads together a series of short, visceral pieces, from the manic, off-center “Fork!” and the hocketing drum and guitar pairs of “Spoon!” to the pounding tom-tom march and spectral guitar chords of “Rupture!” The album culminates in the 13-minute epic “Rapture!”, which spirals a chain of short motives into their outer limits. Happy Place features Mason on drums, along with drummer Austin Vaughn (Here We Go Magic, Pavo Pavo) and guitarists Andrew Smiley (Little Women, Will Mason Ensemble) and Will Chapin (Empyrean Atlas). The band has gained renown for their powerful live performances. The music is physically intense to play, even painful at times, not to mention mentally taxing. It is performed ritualistically, at high volume and with high intensity, without interruption. "In exceptional rituals—ecstatic revelations, states of possession during which individuals dance or make music highly charged with the supernatural—one of the methods employed all over the world consists in putting performers outside their daily rhythmic cycles by breaking their physiological routines with fasting and lack of sleep. The end result may be excitement of the psyche, but the starting point is visceral. The change of register cannot be brought about unless it starts in the very depths of the organism." -- Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech <img width="3280" height="4928" width_o="3280" height_o="4928" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7c273335c3c7ed20f5ec3cd1f32870797b12c79fc0708b3ae4a1bfa617c37e77/DSC_6504.jpg" data-mid="38980300" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7c273335c3c7ed20f5ec3cd1f32870797b12c79fc0708b3ae4a1bfa617c37e77/DSC_6504.jpg" /> (pictured left to right: Andrew Smiley, Will Mason, Austin Vaughn, Will Chapin. Photo by Bryan Sargent) Album credits: Recorded January 2016 at Seaside Lounge, Brooklyn NY Engineered by Jon Altschuler Mixed and mastered by Joseph Branciforte Album art by Julian Cartwright https://willmasonmusic.com/Will-Mason-Ensemble Mon, 10 Aug 2015 17:08:19 +0000 Will Mason Music https://willmasonmusic.com/Will-Mason-Ensemble Beams of the Huge Night by Will Mason Ensemble Debut album Beams of the Huge Night released on New Amsterdam Records August 28 2015. Purchase via: Bandcamp, Amazon, iTunes Profile: Will Mason mixes composition and improvisation, decorum and din -- The Boston Globe Album of the year 2015: Beams of the Huge Night by the Will Mason Ensemble --Avant Music News 10 Best Experimental Albums of 2015: Beams of the Huge Night by the Will Mason Ensemble. --Something Else! "Beams of the Huge Night is a sprawling, ambitious project and Mason has a unique musical vision in the midst of a highly intricate creative process. He successfully seizes on the ambiances of positive and negative natural environments and conveys them with help of this empathetic and very talented group of musicians. This is an unusual album; one where it would be as easy to become as lost as it would be in the woods of northern Maine were it not for an expert guide like Mason." -- All About Jazz Beams of the Huge Night press release from New Amsterdam Records: In a sparsely-populated part of northern Maine, not far from the mountains of the Appalachian Trail, composer and drummer Will Mason secluded himself for eight weeks in a one-room cabin by a lake. He had no running water, electricity, internet, or phone service – only a pencil, manuscript paper, and a few books. For some, this would be unbearably ascetic, but for Mason, a Maine native, the rural, hermitic setting inspired a singular collection of compositions. “The place where music is made really matters – you can hear it in what results.” said Mason, 26, who is currently pursuing a doctorate in music at Columbia University. “After I moved to New York, I worried my music was becoming a bit too stylish or slick. It’s very easy to get preoccupied thinking that you’re expected to write in a certain way. I needed some time away to regain my accent, so to speak.” The pieces Mason wrote capture the elemental hugeness of nature. In six tracks spanning over 70 minutes, the composer’s debut album Beams of the Huge Night explores how it feels to be isolated in a place that can inspire awe just as easily as unease. The music is baroquely detailed at times, at other times spare; sometimes menacing, sometimes meditative. It’s otherworldly music of immense complexity that nevertheless sounds seamless and coherent. Mason’s sonic palette is informed as much by jazz avant-garde pioneers like Albert Ayler and Eric Dolphy as by contemporary concert music composers like Georg Friedrich Haas and György Ligeti. Color and texture are privileged, and lithe and sinuous grooves come into focus only to recede quickly back into the murk. Much of the music is meticulously through-composed, but it also incorporates extensive improvisation by a band comprised of some of NYC’s brightest young musicians. The unique instrumentation of the ensemble includes oboe (Stuart Breczinski), alto saxophone (Daniel Fisher-Lochhead), female voice (Nina Moffitt), two guitars (Travis Reuter and Andrew Smiley), upright bass (Dan Stein), and drums (Mason). This same working band has been performing in NYC for over three years, garnering a devoted following and a reputation for gripping and tightly-executed live performances – often foregoing traditional jazz clubs and performing in rock venues and DIY spaces. After honing the material live, the band recorded over three days, and Mason worked for a month mixing with producer Alexander Overington (Rafiq Bhatia, Radiolab). The result is a record that more closely resembles an indie rock album in its attention to detail, which in turn renders the strange sound worlds Mason creates more intentional, more understandable, more accessible. Album credits: Recorded March 2014 at Seaside Lounge in Brooklyn NY Engineered by Jon Altschuler Mixed by Alexander Overington Mastered by Liberty Ellman Album artwork by Mark Nystrom <img width="5000" height="3333" width_o="5000" height_o="3333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e8f60a7143bbac0d2e24decb3c55f14dafe05e4b9f3e8f7310e41f80c8200426/HaleyShaw-6299_5000_o.jpg" data-mid="38980289" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e8f60a7143bbac0d2e24decb3c55f14dafe05e4b9f3e8f7310e41f80c8200426/HaleyShaw-6299_5000_o.jpg" /> (left to right: Stuart Breczinski, Andrew Smiley, Curtis Macdonald, Will Mason, Dan Stein, Nina Moffitt, Travis Reuter. Photo credit Hayley Shaw.)<img width="1200" height="1200" width_o="1200" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0e349be236526a7d0d65cb6624c0af0a0a62f214743227f01c431c21a7c5a82a/a0475909298_10.jpg" data-mid="38980288" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0e349be236526a7d0d65cb6624c0af0a0a62f214743227f01c431c21a7c5a82a/a0475909298_10.jpg" /> https://willmasonmusic.com/Ned-Rothenberg-Lester-St-Louis-Will-Mason-trio Wed, 29 Mar 2023 16:51:54 +0000 Will Mason Music https://willmasonmusic.com/Ned-Rothenberg-Lester-St-Louis-Will-Mason-trio https://willmasonmusic.com/Rime Fri, 25 Nov 2022 15:17:51 +0000 Will Mason Music https://willmasonmusic.com/Rime Rime (Planetary Candidate) by Michi Wiancko Score available by requestReview from the premier performance: "Mason’s “Rime” for violin solo stood out for a musical vocabulary that eschewed periodic rhythms and diatonic harmonies. Beginning with stuttering pizzicatos played by both hands, Mason slowly but confidently transformed textures from plucked harmonics and hammer-ons to bowed tremolos, alternating double stops in jerky rhythms, culminating in a high note that degraded into soft bow noise."—Christian Hertzog, San Diego Union Tribune https://willmasonmusic.com/Duo-with-Laurie-Amat-AS220-Dec-2023 Tue, 26 Dec 2023 16:08:14 +0000 Will Mason Music https://willmasonmusic.com/Duo-with-Laurie-Amat-AS220-Dec-2023 https://willmasonmusic.com/thet-thet Sun, 10 Sep 2023 20:44:18 +0000 Will Mason Music https://willmasonmusic.com/thet-thet thet thet, for drums and electronicsI've been doing versions of this piece, live for a while and thought I'd record a rough version.&nbsp; All the pitched material up until the very end of the piece comes from the snare drum and china cymbal (specifically, a truckload of comb filters, + a vocoder, + compression and delays). Everything's timelined out and automated so all I do is sit back and go into a meditative state.