All in the Same Direction.

tousdanslameme.strikingly.com

Composed entirely out of field recordings and interviews collected over an eight week period from June to August 2015 in Paris, France.

The concept for Tous Dans La Même Direction first emerged in September 2014—before the killings at Charlie Hebdo and the Hypercacher, before the tragedy at the Bataclan. I had just composed a 2-minute piece made entirely out of samples recorded in San Francisco. As an avid listener, this process was thrilling to me; sound worlds and instruments I was incapable of physically playing suddenly became accessible. I searched madly for another outlet, another city, another sound source to explore. At this point, I only had a vague sense of the situation of Muslim citizens in France, but the confluence of cultures fit with my own grasps of the Arabic and French languages. I decided on Paris. The city would frame my passion for found sound, field recording, and electronic music in a cultural context, giving otherwise purely aesthetic decisions conceptual weight.

The final album exists somewhere between fiction and documentary, providing a phenomenological experience of the Paris I heard. I stayed true to working exclusively from field recordings, although at times heavily mangled and manipulated by Logic Pro X—the interface that guided my musical universe. I plucked single notes from acoustic sources, individual phonemes from spoken sentences, assembling a palette of virtual, half-real half-imagined, instruments. My creative process mirrored the indeterminate state of my subjects’ cultural identities. The sounds originated from a clear provenance yet manifested themselves in new, shifting ways.

However, these fifteen tracks are not an ethnomusicological study. From a compositional standpoint, I largely stayed true to my own American and European influenced musical vernacular. This made sense on a literal front, as my interview subjects were actually more in tune with American popular music than I was (despite having never visited the U.S.). Offering up a pastiche of Middle Eastern stylings would have been unfaithful to their actual experience. Furthermore, the act of translating interviews and field recordings through my own filter embodies the driving core of the album: how does one engage with difference when they themselves are an outsider? Does art, and specifically sound art, have the potential to provide an imaginary space of connection?

Tous Dans La Même Direction is an environment to be explored. It flits in and out of existence as one engages or daydreams in its presence. Each track gestures toward a progression or idea, bleeding seamlessly from one to the next. This structure resists the commercial urge to rip songs from their surrounding tissue (an ironic proposition for music made entirely from collage). The album is a futile effort to create some degree of order out of sonic scraps, combining noises from separate times and locations into a medium of measured organization. Fittingly, as the album progresses, the transitions give less and less leeway for dismemberment.

The goal of my project was to take marginalized Muslim words and voices seriously, to approach my research subjects with the utmost humility and with a willingness to simply listen. My interviews centered on a group of Arab students in the Arabic Studies department at Sorbonne Paris III. Before our sessions, I informed each interviewee that their testimony could later be used in the musical and academic aspects of my project. To respect their privacy, I am unable to foreground their real names. However, I am deeply indebted to them and the time they took to talk to me. Although they often joked that I must be CIA (why else would a non-Muslim boy from California travel all the way to Paris to talk to them?), they expressed a verve and openness to share their experiences. This album, and any projects that later stem from my experiences in Paris, would be impossible without their emotional labor. I will do my best to someday return the favor.