Vandalia is a collection of generative pieces, but at the same time, those generative pieces have provided a cause for reflection on how Appalachia's history unfolded and shaped my region, my culture, and ultimately, myself. If the generative pieces are a product of my imagination and its influences, then my imagination, in turn, is at least, in part, a product of these forces that reach far beyond the self. At the same time, Vandalia is also a concept: music for an Appalachia that never was, but might have been. An alternative story of Appalachia.

This collection is a meditation on time: the deep time of geological processes; the historic time of those events that precede and envelop us; the time of personal history, of memory and remembering.

But time is also a trap. Appalachian culture is defined by a type of fatalism: that things happen because they are meant to, fated.

I spend a lot of time thinking about Walter Benjamin's "Angel of History":

"[The Angel of History's] face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm."

.... Where we see a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe....

A story about the past is told. It is repeated until it becomes truth, and we become merely the inheritors of its tale, surrounded by "the appearance of a chain of events," even as we are tossed forward by a storm. Fait accompli. But, of course, to the Angel of History, this is no chain at all.

Some parts of that story are irrefutable: the story of Appalachia begins hundreds of millions of years ago, as colliding tectonic plates thrust low-lying peat marshes into the heavens and buried them between the folds of rock. Over eons, erosion wore those once-mighty mountains into a sinew of stone that runs from Alabama to Acadia, and the peat marshes, warmed and squeezed into coal, were exposed once more.

If you ever see a strata containing coal, it appears like a black mark. A ribbon of stain between the layers of sandstone and shale.

But other parts of that story might have been different. Even though history unfolded one way, it didn't -have- to unfold that way. The dead might be awakened and pieced back together, forming a new fabric which resists the winds of an "inevitable" path of progress. (To be clear; this is not a rejection of progress, but rather a rejection of the idea that only a specific direction of progress is inevitable. Progress not as opportunity, but as fate.)

Yes, these are still album notes.

Generative music creates what I think of spontaneous assemblages. The title track, "Vandalia," exemplifies this concept: to my ears, it is an orchestra warming up before a concert, when bits of melody coalesce and disperse. Generative music is an experiment in possibility: any piece contains invariant elements, but the product, at the same time, always changes and surprises us. It is shaped by its heuristics, whatever they might be, but its outcome is hardly fated. Nothing in a generative piece is beholden to its past; even in these pieces, where loopers literally capture elements of the past, they distort and reshape it, and even more contrast it with the elements being presently produced by a patch.

A piece may be self-consistent without being constant or unchanging. You never cross the same river twice.

But "Vandalia" itself is important: When West Virginia was admitted to the union in 1863, one of the names proposed for this new state was Vandalia. There is something lyrical in the name that the ordinate 'West Virginia' lacks, and so I have always through of it as a way of thinking about some different path West Virginia and Appalachia might have followed.

"New River Gorge," "Kanawha," and "Criel Mound," all represent different aspects of pre-European Contact West Virginia. The New River is, ironically, one of the oldest rivers in the world -- and rivers, streams and creeks defined the settling of Appalachia, going back nearly 14,000 years. People lived in "the hollows," as we colloquially call the valleys between these mountains, carved slowly by water over millennia. The Kanawha is the largest river in West Virginia, and the track named for it combines a sense-memory of seeing it clouded in fog on a crisp autumn morning, with the idea that thousands of years before, people sang on its banks. One of the groups that lived in the Kanawha valley (where I reside) were the Adena. The Adena were a mound-building culture, and the Criel Mound is one of the largest (and one of the last remaining) earthen structures they created. Although we don't know (and cannot know) the exact purpose of the mounds, many served as burial sites. Sacred places. Hundreds of them dotted the alleuvial plains of the Kanawha and Ohio rivers when Europeans arrived. They were built almost two thousand years ago, and they had survived many other cultures that followed the Adena. But they were built on the banks of rivers, valuable for agriculture and industry, so many were razed as the European displaced the indigenous people.

This is an inflection point. Terrence Malick's film, The New World, uses the story of Pocahontas to explore the tension at the moment of Contact, where history might have flowed one way if it had followed a path of mutual respect, but concludes with the erasure of its subject after Pocahontas is assimilated into English society. I think about that film a lot, too.

"Dolly Sods" is one of the lynchpin compositions of the album; it is built from very simple elements, which are recorded and recorded again to create its spontaneous assemblages. It's method of composition is recomposition. Named for a nature reserve high in the Appalachian plateau, which also straddles the continental divide, "Dolly Sods" is a piece that constantly peers into its past to make something new, weaving recollection into novelty. Thomas Jefferson once argued that the Constitution should be rewritten every nineteen years (his estimation of the amount of time that passed between successive generation), "The earth belongs always to the living generation.... The constitution and the laws of their predecessors extinguished then in their natural course, with those who gave them being. This could preserve that being till it ceased to be itself, & no longer. Every constitution then, & every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, & not of right." (The originals were definitely not Originalists.)

That story which began hundreds of millions of years ago created "coal country." "Ghosts of Mingo" represents another inflection point. The coal industry chewed up the bodies of Appalachians, holding them in indentured servitude by paying them with company scrip (a currency which could only be used for purchases from company-run business) and placing them in ever-growing debt. The miners attempted to unionize, only to have armed mercenaries brought in to harass, beat, and sometimes murder the miners. Eventually, tensions between miners and the companies grew until armed conflict broke out. The coal mine wars. Mingo County became known as "Bloody Mingo," and the violence became national news. "Ghosts of Mingo" is intended as a sort of dirge: a lament for the fallen miners. The crumbly texture of the track reflects how the echoes of their struggle still resonate through Appalachia.

But as I said, this was an inflection point -- a place where the history of the region, which is a history of exploitation and human suffering -- might have changed if the coal miners war had continued, sweeping through Appalachia and ushering in a new autonomous nation, able to direct its own course. I imagine that nation as one more equitable and concerned with the welfare of its citizens, rather than the profits of outside corporate interests. "Star City" is a complement to the "Ghosts of Mingo," then. I grew up a stone's throw away from Star City, but it wasn't until I was in my thirties that I learned about how it had had a socialist government throughout much of the '20s and '30s, until World War II.

Most of the rest of the album is inspired by sense-memories of places in West Virginia I have visited or spent time in: "Spruce Knob" is the highest point in West Virginia; the "NQRZ" (National Quiet Radio Zone) houses the Green Bank observatory (and the vibrato rates used in the piece share frequencies with pulsars discovered by the radio telescope); "Cheat Lake" was my childhood swimming hole, where I spent many summer afternoons floating in the lake and staring into the sky; "Blackwater Falls" was inspired, in particular, by one winter visit to the falls that found them frozens in cascade; "Route 119" is the main highway that connected northern and southern West Virginia before the Interstate system, and a road that I have lived near for most of my time in West Virginia (the particular track was inspired by my own experience with a UFO near the road, but honestly, it feels a little goofy to recount again, so I will direct you to the patch notes for more information, if you're curious). "Point Pleasant '67" is a reference to both the Moth Man and the tragic Silver Bridge collapse.

If this section of the album notes feels rushed -- I have written more on each of these tracks in the patch notes found on YouTube and Patchstorage.

What I can say of these sense-memories, of these experiences, of this life.... There is a perception of Appalachia as a backward place, but I never felt like I grew up in a backward place until I left and found myself having to constantly explain and justify my native land. Part of this project, then, is also about representation. When you think of Appalachian music, if you think of anything at all, you are likely to think of the twang of a banjo or the airy intonation of a hammered dulcimer, the excited call and response of bluegrass, or the antiquated strums of folk songs. But this is Appalachian music.

When I started college, I randomly chose a Russian literature course. I became instantly enamored with my professor, Lina, a delightful, witty Russian woman who had grown up in Soviet Moscow and studied across Europe. She was cultured. One day, I sat in her office, and I mentioned some modernist painter, Pollock or Kandinsky, making some sophomoric point about art (which I'm sure I was pleased with, being a freshman).

Lina leaned forward in her chair, her eyes wide with astonishment. "But growing up where you did, how did you learn about art?"

I think about that conversation a lot, too.