: Composer, Pianist, Sound Designer, Producer

This collection of interpretive pieces imagines Renaissance madrigals of the composer Carlo Gesualdo as longform ambient drone pieces that evoke whispers of the past. Madrigals, a type of small ensemble vocal piece usually performed by members of a household or consort ensemble, serve this purpose well, since their inventive harmonies and sudden changes of mood, texture, and tempo lead to contrasts between moments of long solitude and moments of flurried motions. Carlo Gesualdo was a composer in the late Renaissance infamous for murdering his wife and her lover when he found them together. Gesualdo spent the rest of his life trying to escape that image of a murderer, and whether or not historians deem him successful there, he certainly did succeed at pushing the boundaries of chromatic harmony for the time. The synths used in this album were designed to have a vague resemblance to the human voice, but also to bring a grittier, noisy aspect to the music that hints at the programmatic references to flies and insects that the text of some of the madrigals contains.