Listening to Augmentation and Drift, one may be surprised to hear that the idea behind this piece was birthed in a Brooklyn warehouse techno party. Something that has fascinated me for a while is the shifting perceptions of time at durational electronic music events. I've often found myself surprised to have mistaken five minutes for fifteen, or vice-versa. I attributed these temporal illusions to the repetitive and trance-like nature of the music at hand, and wanted to explore these expansions and dilations in a composition.

I began developing Augmentation and Drift as a piece for these five wind instruments and live generated percussion, based on the rhythmic content being played by the performers, but I quickly dropped any electronics in favour of focusing on writing for the instruments themselves.

My premise was to use each instrument as a texture, akin to a synthesizer voice in a techno track, with mechanical, repetitive and precisely given rhythms. There are some motifs or recognizable phrases in the composition that appear and disappear and then recur, taken up by one voice, then by another. As the piece progresses, these phrases stretch, contract, and shift. In doing so, I tried to emulate the sensation of the same content perceived differently because of the time scale in which it is perceived.

The recording below was performed by the Akropolis Reed Quintet in April 2017, as part of the Manifold Music Festival at the Arts Center in Abu Dhabi.