August 18, 2025
I believe this was made in the Spring of 1979, recorded in my bedroom at my parents’ house when I was 19. I borrowed the title from Henry Miller’s book, not because I was directly influenced by it but because the phrase summed up my state at the time. I was deeply depressed, having just moved back in with my parents after a failed first attempt at living on my own. I think my depression had to do in part with wanting to make music more seriously but not really being sure how to start or having the confidence to do so. Black Spring was an attempt to dig my way out of my emotional state by finally doing something.
I consider this to be my first somewhat satisfying effort at making a piece of music. Or at least, it’s the earliest one I’ll let anyone hear. I had made one earlier piece for an electronic music class in junior college on their giant Emu modular synthesizer. It wasn’t very good and I lost track of the tape; my mother may have a cassette copy of it stashed somewhere. I’ve never had much aptitude for electronics, and the Emu was intimidating with all those knobs and patch cords. But the studio also had an Octave Cat synthesizer (similar to an ARP Odyssey) that was more user-friendly. It had a four-note sequencer, and you could even play two notes at once! I found one in a local music store and traded in my nice Gibson guitar for it.*
I knew even less about recording than I did about synthesizers. I had a Teac 4-track recorder, but didn’t yet realize I could plug the synth directly into it for a cleaner sound. So I ran the synth through my cheap Danelectro guitar amp and put a microphone in front of it. It was naïve but now I’m rather fond of the gritty sound. What is interesting to me now is how I can hear in this piece the seeds for much of the work I’ve done ever since. Many of my compositional concerns and preoccupations were already in place: drones, texture, suspended time. I suppose that could mean that I have not progressed in all these years, but I prefer to believe there are certain things that are simply part of who I am musically.
[* I lost the Cat several years later when I put it on consignment at a music shop in Olympia that then went out of business and disappeared while I was out of town for a few months.]