Just after graduating college in 2018, I was approached by my friend Yoshi Weinberg about composing a new work for their ensemble which had a unique instrumentation. At the time, I had just finished reading Philip Glass’s autobiography, "Words Without Music", and was captivated by a particular description he had used to describe a small collection of his works:

"The players improvised, within prescribed limits, extended long tones. At times, clouds of notes would emerge that formed harmonic clusters, as if surfing through the ongoing ocean of rhythm. There were certain things that remained the same: a constant beat would always be there—a steady stream of notes. Within that, the texture could change and the melodies could float throughout. There could be a wash of sound, places with just a little bit of rhythm, and places with barely more than long tones. It could sound like a cloud of music that would shift from being structured to amorphous. At moments, just as the rhythmic structure became audible, the long tones had a way of overriding it, adding a depth to the music."

At the time, I had been working heavily in three different veins of music: austere minimalism, free improvisation, and ambient soundscapes. Inspired by how his description seemed to encapsulate all three of these, I composed a short work following his guidelines entitled "Amorphous".

Unfortunately, shortly after completing it, the commissioning ensemble disbanded, and the work seemingly had no future with such a niche orchestration. In an attempt to give it second life, I re-orchestrated it in order to multi-track record it myself, resulting in this recording. As it turned out, the work found several lives afterward: a percussion ensemble arrangement, an audio-visual generative installation, a dance film, and ultimately an expanded open-score edition commissioned for Yoshi's new ensemble, InfraSound.