In early July 2023, Carrie Frey & Adrianne Munden-Dixon joined Dave Ruder of Gold Bolus Recordings over Zoom to talk about their debut solo albums, both released on Gold Bolus this year, as well as their friendship and collaborations.

Dave Ruder: I was thinking a logical place to start would be to start with the origin of how you know each other and how you have come to play music together and have artistic or friendly social connections.

Carrie Frey: Well, we met what year was it? Like 2016?

Adrianne Munden-Dixon: Yeah, we first played together in 2016. Carrie doesn’t remember this, but we actually met at Aspen Music Festival with students and we ushered a Joe Cocker concert together.

CF: I remember the Joe Cocker concert cause he was like jumping around on stage. Crazy! But I was too distracted to notice other ushers.

DR: And so you have “gotten by with a little help from your friends” ever since?

CF: Yeah. But we met at this gig in 2016 that was a concert by Aeon Ensemble for Climate Change.

AMD: Yeah, at Carnegie Hall. And it was my first gig moving back to New York after grad school in Pittsburgh. And Carrie and I played a quartet with DJ Spooky that he wrote. And we got these really cool sweatshirts…

CF: That were treated to show if the air was polluted, but they weren’t actually, they…

AMD: Were prototyped so they were just sweatshirts.

CF: And everybody else was wearing like concert black and we were wearing squiggly sweatshirts. I think the designer had not intended to give them to us, but we were like, “we get these right?” And he was like let me talk to someone.

AMD: And we just kept them

CF: We got them! So that was how we met.

DR: Do you still have the sweatshirts?

CF: I only just gave it away this last time that I moved, this week. Very sorry.

AMD: I haven’t been able to wear mine cuz it was, when I performed in it, it was like a huge bag on me because they were all one size. So my husband usually wears that sweatshirt.

DR: So that was the first time you played together. How did you start to form a relationship enough to be in a group together?

CF: So a little bit after that, Julia [Henderson] and I were starting a piano quartet and we were like, who should we get on violin? And I thought, I just met this awesome person. So we asked Adrianne to read piano quartets with us and ended up forming Desdemona, which is now our kind of hybrid group that sometimes is a piano quartet or a piano quintet or a string quartet or a string trio or a whatever we need to do at that moment.

And we got really lucky because Adrianne was spending a lot of time in Savannah at the time. So we would go down and play these sampler pack concerts where we would play like Purcell, and Kurtag, and something that we wrote, and “Toxic” by Britney Spears. And the audiences were just really down for them. We’d be playing Gubaidulina and they would be like, oh, this sounds like something I heard in a movie soundtrack. And we’re like, yeah, it probably does. People were just really open to listening to anything as long as you framed it in a friendly and exciting manner.

AMD: Yeah. And we were able to play in so many different places in Savannah, which was fun. Like, churches, and there’s a kayak shop that hosted us. It had a big open space, not great acoustics, but they would have an event with coolers and beers and snacks and people would bring lawn chairs and listen and have a really chill evening. So yeah, that was a really fun time for our group too. And a great opportunity to play a ton and play the same rep a ton in a variety of acoustics, which I think is so valuable, especially for string instruments.

DR: Word to the wise about Savannah being a great place to play chamber music in all sorts of spaces. So in Desdemona you said that you were playing things that you had written yourselves. Both of your albums are very commission heavy. I’m curious if you were commissioning things together or if some of the works that you have written on both of your albums were the first kinds of commissioning that you were doing.

CF: I feel like a lot of the pieces that are on both of our albums are Desdemona-related. Like Maria Kaoutzani for example, was actually one of the first composers I played when I got to New York, because she was at NYU. And then Desdemona played her quartet, “jaune doré”, many times, and that was one of our core repertoire pieces for a year or two. So then all three of us actually – Adrianne, me and Julia – all commissioned solo pieces from her, kind of growing out of this thing where, we’ve been playing her music a lot, so we wanna play more of her music. And I recently premiered a trio by her with my string trio Chartreuse also. So it’s just one of those ongoing relationships where you get to know someone’s music and you’re like, yeah, this is the kind of thing that’s fun for me.

I would say for me, I’ve been into commissioning solo music for a long time, since college. I had a commissioning project around speech rhythms and language in the viola, and I never ended up recording it, and then wasn’t performing those pieces as much. So then I thought, okay, next time I have a critical mass of solo pieces, I’m gonna record an album. So that’s what [Seagrass] is. This feels like the second batch of solo pieces that I’ve commissioned in my life. And they’re not all commissions, actually, the Anthony Green piece was a transcription where he has this really cool violin piece and I also have a terrible habit of playing a lot of violin pieces. So when there’s one I like, I’ll be like, “Hey do you mind if I just take this down a fifth?” Usually people are like, sure. Or they’re like, “no, it’s really for violin”, but that happens rarely. So that’s what happened with that one. I was like, “can I play this?”, and he was like, “yes!”.

DR: Yeah. I’d love to talk more about the violin to viola and viola to violin stuff a little bit later, but Adrianne, just wondering from your perspective about within Desdemona and by yourself for solo pieces or other things, what your history with commissioning artists has been?

AMD: Yeah, I think I, it started with just friends either giving me violin pieces they’d already written in college or grad school and then yeah, especially through Desdemona, getting to know certain composers and just really falling in love with the way people were thinking, or their ideas for strings and wanting to have another piece to play on my own by those people. In 2019, we played a string trio plus percussion piece by David Bird. And I just loved everything about the concept, the content, everything about it. So I talked to him to see if he would be willing to write me a solo piece. And that was the first person on my album, that was the first commission that I did for the album. That was like late 2019.

And then the pandemic happened and I was spending a lot more time alone. And so I had some other composers in mind that I really liked their work and didn’t have solo violin pieces yet. And that’s kind of how the album gained form. And Carrie and I were talking about writing each other pieces at that time, and it just came out of that really naturally. I’d been improvising a lot, and that’s… I’ve been trying to get away from that being the core process that I use for composition, but it was a huge part of the piece that I wrote for Carrie. And some people have said that it sounds like Ysaÿe or it sounds like whatever, but definitely some of the pieces that I was playing at the time crept into my writing.

DR: So I guess I’m also curious, as you are commissioning these pieces whether Maria or David or some of the other people you’ve mentioned, what has the role of solo performance been in your careers? Has there been the idea of making an album, since this is the first time for both of you making a solo album? Do you both have rigorous solo performing practices or is the album really the way that you’re trying to express this currently?

CF: I mean, I think solo performing is a funny thing for me because there are a lot of things where I’ll practice a piece for years and never perform it. And it’s just kind of for myself, like there are a lot of things that I’ve been secretly learning for a long time and then every now and then a recital opportunity pops up. So I used to always try to have something on tap just in case. And Adrianne’s piece for me ended up being premiered on my grad school recital, because I wanted something showy, and my teacher loved it. 

And then we booked a little solo tour together, which is a funny way to book a solo tour. I don’t love traveling alone, I’m a little boring when I do. So we booked ourselves like a little California honeymoon, which is just my favorite way to travel, honeymoons with friends. And we did a little wine country tour that hit some really nice series out west. We played on Ravi Kittappa’s “Permutations” and at Indexical in Santa Cruz and had some excellent burritos and some delicious wine and just shared these new pieces that were kind of in progress at the time. And we played a couple of backyard concerts, which is also really fun because this is kind of weird music in the general sense of things, but people were like, “wow, like what was that? That was amazing!” And we got to be like, yeah, these are things that we wrote for each other. 

AMD: Yeah I’ve been interested in solo playing. In grad school I did a what’s it called? Sorry, I’m eight months pregnant, my brain doesn’t work. I did an independent study on the evolution of the violin, alongside the repertoire being written for violin. And so I’ve always been really interested in solo music for this instrument that isn’t piano or a chordal instrument, and how that has evolved and forced the instrument to evolve as well. I’ve always been interested in super early stuff all the way to how things are changing now. So before the pandemic happened, I was trying to get more into, how can I develop my own voice on the violin, especially with my improvisation practice and working with composers whose ideas and voices I liked, and how that would influence how I was developing. All the pieces on the album and some of these other pieces that I have floating around, like what Carrie was saying about having pieces just for yourself or things you’re drawn to but maybe not necessarily performing, have all kept me really excited and interested about this instrument that’s maybe not as symphonic as as a piano.

CF: Yeah, as you were saying with the historicality of it and it not being piano or an instrument that people expect to play solo, I think even more so, people are like “solo viola”? Because it hadn’t even been considered a solo instrument at all until like the 1920s with the first Primrose and Tertis commissions. So I think there is a rich history of commissioning new viola works because there just aren’t as many solo viola pieces as there are violin pieces. And that also goes into why I’m stealing so much violin rep, because if you wanna play older music you have to steal.

AMD: But it’s ironic just cuz the viola is so much more resonant than the violin, you know? And I like solo viola because there’s often such a rich sound and more resonance that comes out of it… I mean I love an E string. I am not one of these violinists, who doesn’t like the E string, but you know, viola has so much going for it as a resonating body.

CF: I have a lot of problems when I’m writing violin solos cause like I’ll write it and I don’t think about the E string. I’m like, that’s not my favorite part of the violin. And then by the end of the piece I’m like, oh, I should probably put in a couple things on the E.

DR: Yeah. Adrianne, have you ever taken viola or even cello works and moved them to violin? I know Carrie, that you’ve talked about this translation the other way.

AMD: I think the classic thing to do, especially as a kid, is to play the Bach cello suites on violin. But I haven’t done as much stealing viola rep. We do have the luxury of having an insane amount of repertoire for our instrument, but there’re definitely pieces that I would like to play. I really love the Brahms Viola Sonatas… but, I think it works really well on viola. So I mean if I thought that the violin could do a piece justice, then I’m sure there are pieces that I need to explore. I’m not opposed to it. 

CF: Ask forgiveness, not permission. Yeah, I mean on the cello front, I actually have a recording of the Grieg Cello Sonata on viola that I did in my master’s degree with Robert Fleitz, which I find hilarious. But also I love that piece and I’ve played a bunch of cello transcriptions, like Reiko Fueting’s Kaddish was originally for cello, and Leilehua Lanzilotti got the viola transcription, and then I played that on my recital. And then Daijana Wallace also, I played her violin piece and her cello piece, which are both gorgeous. Sometimes if there’s a composer that you’re like, I wanna play this, but they don’t have any viola pieces, then you can just be like, can I take all of your repertoire and play it on viola?

DR: So to go back a little bit to something that I started to ask about before, Adrianne, you’ve actually done this part, and Carrie, for you it’s coming up. But the idea of putting an album out, I’m curious what that means to you and what it feels like to take work that you have commissioned, that you have caused to exist (even if you only wrote one piece on each of your albums) and what it means to you to collect that material. What does the format of an album speak to? Is that significant or not in your trajectory as musicians?

AMD: Yeah, I think for me I’m interested in other art forms besides music. I don’t practice any of those professionally or publicly, but you know, so many others, like visual art or writing, there’s a concrete thing that you end up with often. And I wanted to have something like that for me with my performance career. And having like a snapshot of a time of these commissions I was working on, these pieces of my playing. Just having that for myself and, you know, to show in the trajectory of what I’ve been doing. I play on other people’s albums and so like the collection of recordings I have are other people’s projects, but also a snapshot of my playing at that time. I wanted something that was curated by me and really personal in that way.

CF: Yeah, I think I feel similarly about it. It’s like I’ve been on a lot of other people’s albums and this was always something that was in the back of my head. I wanted to record a solo album with pieces I’ve commissioned and it never felt like the right time. And then after the pandemic, it was like, well, we’ve been spending a lot of time playing alone. So I had this critical mass of solo pieces that I’d been working on or that we’d performed recently and it felt like a good time to make it happen. And also like a good time financially where I was like, I think I can actually do this and have it be nice. I had a little difficult moment when I was recording some of this in Fall [2022] where I was going through some nerve injury issues and not practicing as much as I wanted to, but then it was even more like, I have to record this now because I might not be able to do it in a month.

And luckily then I went to PT and it got a lot better, and now I’m in great shape. So by the time I recorded the second half of the album, I was like, okay, great, this is like how I want it to sound. But yeah, it just felt very much like this is the time that I need to do this. And then to be able to share something that’s me by myself, because a lot of my playing is with chamber groups and large ensembles, which is really fun for me. It’s much scarier to release something that’s just me on my own, because I’m much more critical of my own sound and choices than I am if it’s my quartet. I’m like, “yeah, my quartet sounds awesome! I love this album!” So for just me, it’s like, “yeah, I love this album, but I’m also terrified to see what people say about it or think about it”. But I also hope that it’s fun to listen to.

DR: Definitely it’s more vulnerable when it’s just you. But also, yeah, I like the idea of taking a snapshot. I think you’re both teasing out this idea of documenting the skill that you have in the community that you’ve built of people who you’re working with. Also hell yeah for PT,  it’s very exciting that you are feeling physically like you can play the things that you have commissioned. In thinking about the connection that you both have and the kind of community of composers that you’ve built around you, I’m curious to dive into the two pieces that appear on both albums. What do you both feel is there in the version that you are playing, and then also to talk about how those pieces have translated for the other person.

AMD: Well, I know Carrie’s playing very well. And we’ve improvised together and played pieces that encouraged a lot of personal choices together. And I don’t know, I was in Montreal when I was writing this piece, so I wasn’t around my friends and I had just started living here, so I felt a little isolated. It was winter and I was missing my friends and just playing stuff alone and thinking about what would I love to hear Carrie play, and what would Carrie like to play, and what does Carrie do really well particularly, and then trying to play around with those ideas myself on violin. I have a viola, but I only use it to write really specific things. I just wrote a string quartet and I needed to use the viola in order to know if this was possible.

So I wrote Carrie’s piece on the violin but imagining how she would play it. So there’s not much E string stuff in my piece. And a lot of over-pressure and sounds that I think would sound better on viola, in my opinion certain things that needed a bigger or or deeper sound than the violin has. And yeah, just sending her drafts and sending her sound clips and being like, what do you think about this? Like, would you like this? Or, “I don’t know, you know, so”, and we have such a close relationship that I felt comfortable doing that. And yeah, it kind of just came about that way. 

I sent her the pages and then she sent me a mockup and realized that the pages weren’t in the right order. It sounded great, but it wasn’t the right order of the pages, I think that one of the pages was sent separately. I was like, this sounds cool, but maybe switch them. But the cool thing about Carrie’s [piece] is that you can absolutely switch the order around and I love that. So I have moments in mind that are definitely open to interpretation, especially rhythmically or in duration. But Carrie’s [piece] is even more what I’d call choose your own adventure of how and where you wanna go with it, how long you wanna do something, if you wanna do part of it at all. But I’ll let Carrie talk about that.

DR: I just wanna ask one question and point one thing out before you do Carrie. One is, I love how there’s a discrepancy in how long these pieces are. I think there’s like two minutes of difference between your two versions. I also just wanted to make sure I know which is the original version for each. So for “Zastrugi”, that was originally written for viola and then the violin version came?

AMD: Yeah

DR: And for “Seagrass/reed” it was originally written for violin and then the viola version came?

CF: Yeah. I think one thing that’s really cool, because both of our processes for these pieces were rooted in improvisation. I was also improvising and thinking, “what would Adrianne enjoy playing? What would be fun to do?”, and I made it very sparkly because I think violin harmonics just have this special shine to them. And [Seagrass is] kind of about space travel and hive minds and love, so I just wanted it to sound spacey and scary and dangerous and sparkling.

AMD: Like me.

CF: Yes, like Adrianne! And I think it’s really fun that it’s rooted in us playing our own instruments and imagining another instrument because part of the practice of playing someone else’s music is putting yourself in their body in a way, which is also kind of what my piece is about – what would it be like to like experience humanity as something that can be outside of just one body or like a shared proprioception? So that’s kind of what the process is for us. When I’m playing Adrianne’s piece, I kind of imagine myself as Adrianne playing it because you can feel the physicality of the other person’s performance practice in the way that they wrote it. It’s like, these are all things that are fun for me to do, but that I wouldn’t necessarily have come up with on my own. It’s just really interesting to play them and feel like, oh, I’m having a little Adrianne moment here!

DR: That’s a really beautiful way to describe it, particularly for solo music that’s so different from say, commissioning a trio or a quartet from someone.

AMD: Yeah. The opening gestures in Carrie’s piece, I have seen Carrie do those things before and so I always imagine, what does it look like and sound like when Carrie does these things? There is this gliss and over-pressure, scratchy sound that she has, and it’s so detailed, and if I hadn’t seen her do it before, I don’t think… the notation is great. I have a really informed idea of what she’s looking for and so yeah, I definitely try to embody Carrie in places.

CF: About the choose-your-own-adventure aspect of it, I do think it’s really fun because I was like, I know Adrianne is also a composer and improviser, I don’t wanna write too much, you know? I wanna leave a lot of choices for her to have fun with. So all of the transitions between pages are just wide open and the way I do them, I kind of feel like, I already put all my ideas about the piece into the piece. So for me, the piece is shorter because everything I wanna do is there. But for Adrianne, she was able to add two incredible minutes of music. So there are all these things where I was like, wow, I love that sound! I wasn’t thinking about that sound being in here, but of course it belongs.

And I just think the range of expression that she’s found to add little intimate moments, or tingly finger sounds… there are all these really nice little ricochets, and because it’s a recording you can hear every articulation of it really clearly and all these really close sounds that I find really attractive. And I was like, oh, I love that in this music! But I don’t do that in my version of it. I really like what she’s done with ornamentation on some of the final melodies. It just expanded my idea of how the piece could be, which is the fun thing about writing for other people.

AMD: Yeah. I feel similarly about hearing Carrie play my piece several times now, and I love her recording of it so much. I feel like I put everything on the page, and so I’m reading the notation with so many prior ideas behind it that I don’t add much, my performances in my own piece don’t vary that much. I love hearing what Carrie does with it and I feel like Carrie really gets a lot out of it, sound-wise. And certain sections she really savors more than I think I do. I feel like she sounds like she has a lot of artistic freedom with it, which I love. In some ways I’m like, yep, this is the piece, even though I didn’t intend for it to be that way. So I really like that about Carrie’s performances on recordings.

DR: Yeah. It’s great to have someone else animate the thing that you did when you didn’t even know it was there. That’s part of the joy of reading for someone else. I’m curious if there are aspects of, or particular pieces of each other’s albums, that you might like to highlight to bring out a way that you kind of observe each other as musicians. So Carrie, I know you’ve had the chance to hear Adrianne’s album, Adrianne, I don’t know if you’ve heard the versions of Carrie’s album that exist now, but just curious if there are things that stand out to you?

CF: I really loved the aspect of pairing a video with so many pieces on Adrianne’s album. I thought that was really cool and just like brings another element to it. I always have images in my head with music, but not the ones that you get when you see a video. So it’s like another thing where you’re seeing someone else’s take on it. And I think that’s really fascinating, listening to it and then seeing the video and being like, oh, this changes the frame for how I’m hearing this music. I love all the pieces, I mean obviously I’m a huge fan of David Bird’s work. He’s been one of my friends since college and it’s been fun to see his style evolve. Maria’s piece on Adrianne’s album is really different from her piece that is on my album. So it’s kind of fascinating to hear that and be like, oh, this one’s like a little more introspective. I had a lot of fun spending time with Adrianne’s album, and hearing some of those pieces that we had toured together. Hearing, like, the definitive version, which it always is if it’s a recording because that’s the one that people are gonna hear more, but it’s also just one version of a piece that you’re playing many times before and after you record it.

AMD: I love Carrie’s [album], I don’t have any vocalization or singing on my album. And Carrie’s so great at that and she has some of that on hers really highlighted. And I love that she’s added that and that she has composers writing for her in that way that really showcase her beautiful voice and ability to do that. It’s funny now I’m thinking about Anthony R. Green’s piece that’s for violin, but the first time I ever heard it was Carrie play it. So I always think of it as a viola piece that I took to play, but it is actually a violin piece. I just love a variety of things on Carrie’s album. I don’t think she has any electronics pieces, right? No. Yeah, I have more electronics, so I love that she has the vocalization aspect with the viola because it’s like this added voice, which is what I also love about electronics, having this added voice or interaction with something. Going off on the video idea, that was also such a fun part of making this album because I worked with different filmmakers, and so their vision was incorporated into this music or their interpretation. I definitely was part of the creative process, but you know, I’m not a director.

CF: Yeah. I really admire your commitment to electronics because I feel like when I’m touring with solo pieces, I don’t wanna have to think about anything except playing viola. So I was always impressed that you were willing to do that extra step, and it’s worth it because you have this whole extra range of sound that you can produce. Or when we were touring with the Hannah Kendall piece with all the little music boxes, there’s these extra logistical elements where you have to set something up. But I think it also shows a commitment to the music for the audience because they’re like, oh, you’ve gone to the trouble to set the stage for this. And I’m like, I just wanna show up and rub some hair on this box!

Actually one of the pieces on my album, Alec Goldfarb’s, he wrote me this beautiful piece with electronics actually, we recorded it on his album and it has speaking and processing and it sounds amazing that way. And I was like, look, I love this piece, I wanna play it a lot. Can you also make an acoustic version? So he did. And that’s the one that I recorded for my album.

AMD: With the electronics and with Hannah Kendall’s piece, which has five specific music boxes that you have to get with these particular tunes, and set them up in a particular formation, and then put dreadlock clips, two dreadlock clips on the violin on certain strings. So there’s all this preparation and it’s written into the piece that when you stop, you put your violin down and redo the music boxes. I love the theatrical aspect of it, but also, you know, it’s never the same, especially with music boxes, even if you turn it three times, you’re seconds off from the other one. So it might end at a different point. I love that, that change can always happen from that, and electronics is less exciting when it doesn’t work. But I just love working with composers who are so well versed in that, whether it’s using something like Max/MSP, an interactive patch or if it’s just a tape. I really love hearing people’s ideas. The violin is a violin, right? But with technology, it could be anything. It could turn into anything.

DR: This is making me think about one of the groups I’m in, thingNY, which has been around for 17 years at this point. And we have a particular habit of being like, we’re gonna do a simple concert. And then it ends up that each piece, we’re each playing a different instrument. There’s all these other electronic things. Last year, we did a show in Red Hook where it started out being like this is gonna be a really simple show. And it worked well, but it was just a big tech thing. The one big piece I wrote for thingNY was all acoustic, nobody switched instruments. It was like 40 minutes of just this one thing.

So it was kind of an uncharacteristic piece for us in a lot of ways. And I appreciate, Adrianne particularly, the way that you collected things on Lung, where this is the collection with the build out. There are some things here that are only the violin, but there’s a way to look at this collection where it’s sort of the violin and these other things to augment it that go together and speak to one another. And Carrie, I think about this with the Rhythm Method album that came out on Gold Bolus also, that there are things on there that are very string-focused, but there are things that it’s strings and voices, this thing that the group does so well where it’s not about gear and having to bring other things, but it’s just how you’re augmenting the sound and how you’re thinking about what the sound palette that the individual or the group does well.

CF: Yeah! With what you were saying about thingNY, it’s a different kind of virtuosity. You guys are virtuosos of logistics and making the electronics work and being able to do all of these different things. And I think that that’s another level of ensemble virtuosity outside of just being really good at music, and it’s kind of unseen and unappreciated, but just wanted to say that I’m impressed.

DR: Thank you. We’re very good at that, you’re right! So just, just conclude, and I don’t know if there’s anything else that you both feel like you wanna add to this conversation about your own work or albums or each other’s albums?

CF: Yeah, I guess I just wanna shout out the pieces that I haven’t talked as much about, that I also am happy to be putting on the album. Like earlier we were talking about composers we met through Desdemona and the last piece on my album is Buck McDaniel’s, and it’s this really beautiful short piece that can be performed as part of a collection of pieces with organ or can be performed on its own. And I just wanted to have that there as a moment of beauty. We met Buck through a Desdemona gig that we were playing for a 9/11 memorial. And then the other piece is Emily Praetorius, and she’s someone who I met through moving to New York and going to a bunch of Columbia Composers concerts and being like, this person is great! 

She had written a viola quartet before and I was like, oh, she really knows what to do with viola! So it was fun to commission a [solo] viola piece. And she was like, you know, a lot of people write sad, slow music for viola. So her piece is really peppy and kind of dirty, and we wanted that to be an element, because so much of the album is kind of dark. So that’s there to just kind of like perk it up. And it also is extremely difficult to perform live. You have to whistle and continue playing. And I think one of the big challenges with singing and playing is being able to separate those parts of your body and be like, I’m doing short movements here, but I’m doing long breaths here. It’s even harder when you’re whistling or humming. So having that on the album, I wanted to showcase the other emotional elements the viola is capable of.

AMD: Yeah. And for mine, I wanted to also just talk very briefly about two of the other composers that we haven’t mentioned. The first piece on my album is by Phong Tran, and Phong is also from Georgia, like me but from the Atlanta area and went to University of Georgia for undergrad. I premiered this piece on a recital at University of Georgia last year. He made a visualizer that goes along with electronics and to access it, it’s all on a website. So you go to the website and you click start, and the audio, the electronic portion and the video start. And we found that we weren’t able to access the video because there was a block on the website at University of Georgia, so I had to go elsewhere and we couldn’t get them to lift it in time for the concert. So I had to go and do basically a screen capture to be able to do the premiere at his alma mater. I thought it was so funny. 

And then the other piece is the title track, “Lung” by Cassie Wieland. That was one of the pieces I just played so much in the early pandemic and it was just one of these like really comforting pieces for me. It’s really meditative, it’s pretty minimalist in a lot of ways and it just, I don’t know, it just made me feel so good to play it and at times that I felt really anxious or uncertain. Cassie, under her band named Vines, did this amazing remix of “Lung”, and I just love listening to it. It’s so nice. It’s a weird thing to be like, oh, I just love listening to myself! But what Cassie made of it is so beautiful.

DR: The remix is also available on Gold Bolus.

AMD: Yep!

DR: Wonderful. Well thank you both for talking about this work that you’ve done and congrats to you both on having envisioned, and followed through, and created these bodies of work and these albums.

AMD: Thank you so much! Thanks for making all of this possible.