Calibrating Friction

Calibrating Friction, my debut portrait album – years in the making – represents the culmination of decades of artistic experimentation and music-making. As of this writing, in 2023, it serves as my artistic mission statement and musical manifesto. Conceived and created at all stages in collaboration with Adam Pietrykowski – also known as the progpop artist Van Tilburg – it is our response to the hypothesis: what if we took metal-influenced classical music and produced it as we would a modern prog metal record? From my childhood training as a classical pianist, to my teenage years pursuing metal music as a guitarist, songwriter, and producer, to my return to classical music in my twenties as a composer, my trajectory as an artist has intertwined – both by instinct and by design – the double helixes of classical and progressive metal. Over the years, these two stylistic and cultural forces have influenced each other in my work to varying degrees, in some ways supporting and in others violently conflicting with each other. In a very real way, my career to this point has been largely defined by my attempts to calibrate that friction. While the music industry and mainstream culture alike position classical and metal as diametrically opposed genres – one characterized by elegance and erudition, the other by noise and aggression – I have always intuitively experienced them as two sides of the same artistic coin. If one forms a playlist that includes Bach, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, and Stravinsky, alongside Meshuggah, Opeth, Symphony X, and Animals As Leaders, one might find a prominent set of shared musical values: a fascination with powerful dramatic narratives, expansive soundscapes, complex formal structures, instrumental virtuosity, extreme precision in ensemble coordination, and a dominant sense of the epic. I obsessively sought these values in my days as a composer/songwriter in the field of progressive metal – especially in my band Faces Of Horizon, which disbanded in 2005 – and I have continued to seek them throughout my career as a composer of classical concert music. With every new piece of chamber or orchestral music that I tackled, my deep roots in metal (especially prog, djent, thrash, death, black, and power) played a significant role in shaping the flow and drama of the music, injecting technical and conceptual elements that resulted in some kind of fusion between the genres. As the years went on and I explored ways of translating metal and guitaristic musical idioms into classical mediums, the stylistic Calibrating Friction brings together five of my most metal-infused compositions from the past decade and reimagines (recalibrates?) them from this perspective of bone-deep fusion. Originally created as pieces of pure chamber music, to be performed live, in concert, by classical ensembles, they all contained the musical elements of progressive metal in their structures and instrumental writing, but – for the most part – using only the sounds of (acoustic) classical instruments. For this album, Adam and I have taken all this music apart, reconstructing it piece by piece in the studio the way we would were we producing a modern metal record. The arrangements have been recrafted, manipulating the instrumental writing to enhance its metal characteristics, injecting more electric guitars and drums into the arrangements, layering in electronic sound design elements, and mixing it all together in a way that could only be done in a production studio, transcending the individual pieces’ origins as live chamber music. Throughout this project, we have been privileged to record with some of our favorite musicians and collaborators in the world, including members of Animals As Leaders, Leprous, Bang On A Can All- Stars, Sirius Quartet, seven)suns, American Brass Quintet, Contemporaneous, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, and so many more – and, fittingly, my first collaboration with Faces Of Horizon drummer Matt Grou since the band parted ways in 2005. It has been a massive endeavor and I am deeply grateful to all these supremely talented artists for their individual contributions to the album. Finally, but certainly not least, none of this would have been possible without the single most impressive musical mind I’ve had the pleasure of knowing: Adam Pietrykowski. We met in college in Montréal in 2005, bonding over guitar-nerd talk about Nevermore and Dream Theater playing on Megadeth’s inaugural Gigantour in the fall of our freshman year; and in the 18 years since, we have collaborated in ways large and small on more projects and initiatives than either of us cares to remember. From our early years in Montréal to the past decade in New York City, we have grown in close tandem as artists, as musicians, as humans – and our combined creative visions (which boast a massive overlap region in our shared Venn diagram) are both fully on display on this, our first full album collaboration, Calibrating Friction.