DEGRADIENT
Kyle Bruckmann
oboe, English horn, electronics, composition
Jordan Glenn
percussion
Jason Hoopes
electric bass
Aram Shelton
alto saxophone, clarinets
Dear Everyone takes its oblique inspiration from the recursive, encyclopedic poetry of Bruckmann’s friend Matt Shears. The book of the same name, published in 2016 by Brooklyn Arts Press, was pegged by early reviews as “pitched dead between thrilling and numbing” with “an absurdist, dark sense of humor.” Bruckmann spent months carrying around a recorder and a fistful of crumpled pages, shoving them into unsuspecting hands, asking friends and family for spontaneous, clumsy readings of fragments. In the end, 99 voices wound up in the cut-up stew. Guests include trombonist Weston Olencki (winner of the 2016 Kranichsteiner prize at Darmstadt, who has also worked with Wet Ink and Ensemble Pampelmousse), and volatile vocalists Theresa Wong, Danishta Rivero (Las Sucias, Voicehandler) and Eugene S. Robinson (Oxbow).
ALBUM: Not Two Records | US distribution: Squidco, Downtown Music Gallery
Performances
DEGRADIENT’s debut at Peralta Station, Oakland, Sept. 2016
Premiere of the full concert version of Dear Everyone at the Lab, SF, May 2017
Album Reviews
RUMINATIONS…
Text from a 2017 year-end newsletter may provide, should one be interested, some context for the album’s creation and insight into just what inhabited our protagonist’s gnarled head at a particularly twisted time in human history:
“Not only is it the culmination of more than a year’s worth of obsession, but I see it as the best I can do, short of agitprop, to make work that is, somehow, all esoteric archness notwithstanding, timely. In part, Dear Everyone is about language, communication, cognition, perception: grasping towards the making of sense within a denuded thoughtscape, despite and in defiance of an all-out assault on niceties like “true” and “false.” It’s about multiplicity, complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity, as abundance – good things, worthy of celebration – not lame excuses for nihilism, a “Get Out of Civility and Integrity Free” card, an “Every Prick for Himself” starter pistol.
And in a very concrete way, it is a vessel containing the voices of one hundred and three of the many, many beloved individuals intersecting my life, making me who and why I am. For such an indulgently eccentric personal statement, it’s one that grapples with just how much “we” there is in selfhood. My voice as carrier frequency, modulating a delicious babel of others’ voices. Maximalism as an attempted inoculation against narcissism. Because that shit will get us all killed.
Love and strength to us all. Turn the wheel.”
Band Photos
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Photo Credit: Lenny Gonzalez.
Photo Credit: Myles Boisen