David HARROW

David HARROW

David Harrow is a record producer, DJ and multimedia artist who currently lives and works in Los Angeles. While performing in and around London in the early 80s he met poet Anne Clark, and many of the recordings he produced for her are considered milestones of the era. He also collaborated on a number of projects with Mike Vamp, Peter Hope, and Pinkie Maclure, which led to a period producing music in Germany with artists such as LeningradSandwich and Fougorki. After a six-month stint as in-house musician/co-producer for seminal San Francisco dance label, Razormaid, he returned to London to perform at various “acid house” events, and began an extended period of music production for the label ONU.

In the 90s, David produce recordings for a wide range of artists, including New Zealand’s Headless Chickens and Salmonella Dub. After working on album projects in Cuba and Jamaica in the early 2000s, he moved to Los Angeles. There he built a studio for his label Workhouse, and began scoring music for film and television. In 2006 he set up the online label, Workhouse Digital, initially to release his back catalogue, but it soon became a showcase for new projects and collaborations. After a successful visual projection at a UCLA party, David branched deeper into multimedia work, particularly the new and exciting area of video mapping.

VIDEO: Terry Riley’s IN C performed by David Harrow

DAVID HARROW

David Harrow could easily play on musical heritage if he wanted, but that's not his style. He has played with enough true legends of both “over” and underground music to last several lifetimes, and could dine out on the hair-raising stories of far out and extreme musical scenes he's been involved with for many years. But the link between all of his musical adventures is his constant quest for new and stimulating sounds, a quest as strong today as it was when he launched into the post-punk climate of the 80s.

 
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DAVID HARROW ON IN C

I have always been aware of Terry Riley and the influence his work had on minimalist music, particularly his groundbreaking In C (1964), but it wasn’t until I taught electronic composition in Los Angeles that I had the opportunity to closely study this piece. I read through the simple but evocative score and began to see that there was a direct correlation between Terry’s piece and the capacity of Ableton Live audio technology, with its use of musical “clips” that can be triggered to repeat at will indefinitely.

I spent some time transcribing the score into a useable Ableton format that would trigger banks of modular electronic sound generators, and began to explore the myriad of musical combinations that this process facilitated. The way the 53 phrases of the piece work with contemporary electronic is quite amazing and wholly captivating. By programming them into modern sequencing methods, new avenues for improvisation are revealed, manipulating the very substance of the sounds themselves.

The music on this CD represents a portion of the entire project, the rest of which can be heard on the Rattle website and downloaded from Rattle’s Bandcamp site. I hope you enjoy the outcome of my immersion into the wonderful world of In C.