Well, right now I've not been able to work as much on new Encomiast material. I've just been sort of tinkering here and there and mulling over older material that I've not yet figured out what to do with. I've got a couple of releases in the can right now and several new threads running that I'm going to chase down this summer, one involving the ebb and flow of traffic in the early evening (related to a quote from a John Cage interview) and the other possibly heading into more of a droney rock sound, maybe with some actual songs. I've been kind of curious to see what would happen if I tried writing more songlike stuff, although it may turn out to be a new project as opposed to an Encomiast thing. Only time will tell if anything comes of these ideas, however.

I guess the short history is that Encomiast has always been a fairly malleable project, encompassing a wide variety of collaborators through the years. I originally started doing this on the old Mp3.com site, and then managed to branch out from there. Encomiast has released 5 full-length collections to date, encomiast (self-release), winter's end (Lens), espera (H/s), mers de sommeil (Mystery Sea), and [laurentide] (Absolute Zero), and we've been on maybe a dozen comps or so.

I first got acquainted with all of these folks back in the days of Mp3.com, and we were eventually able to put the releases together. Lens contacted me about doing winter's end in 2000, and H/s got in touch a couple of years later about espera, although we'd been in contact for a few years as friends by that point. After winter's end, Lens took a hiatus for a number of reasons, but Rob is now getting the label back together so hopefully there will be some new Lens music out soon. H/s is also planning a re-release of the very first encomiast CD I made in 1999, with remixed and remastered tracks. In all cases, the labels I've released with are run by people I've known as friends and then at some point something converges and a release happens.

I have a hard time imagining what things would be like now if I'd never hooked up with Neville, although being in the same town I'm sure we would have crossed paths eventually. I think us working together was sort of inevitable.

We've both been otherwise occupied for the past few months, but at some point this summer we're going to have to continue with things we started back in the mists of 2004. I've got about 20-25 minutes of new Mandible Chatter material sitting in my hard drive and I'm itching to finalize these tracks and start thinking about where else they want to go. It's really been nice for me to be a part of someone else's project for a change, because their ideas and intentions are often quite different from where I would go if I were working on my own. I think we'll be friends and collaborators in some fashion for a long time, and I honestly can't imagine that we wouldn't be.

It's gotten simpler and more solidified recently, now that I have the gear to do things with much longer loops and samples. I usually improvise effects, bass, and live synths to keep things interesting. I've recently been looking for ways to make everything more flexible, though. It's looking like I might need to invest in a laptop and Ableton Live sometime soon, since the demo version I got really seems like what I've been after. Ensemble work would be fun as well, like a gig I put together last summer w/ Neville from MC playing a prepared piano stringboard, Megan on flutes, and my friend Joe making sound with a Balinese bronze xylophone while I did the mixing and added effects and electronic textures. I don't know if we'll be able to do something like that again anytime soon, though, just because the piano is such a difficult thing to move around and it's hard to get a group of good performers and improvisers together in the first place. At this point, I feel like I need to put together a new shtick before I do any more solo shows, though.

Luckily I am getting a music degree, so I'm in the right element, but it's still a bitch sometimes. There's just so much to keep track of, especially when teaching, but I always try to make time to play music or just play with sounds in some capacity. I've got a bit of an encomiast backlog now, though, so whenever things with school and research get too crazy I've got things to work on releasing. Unfortunately, school does tie me down a bit more than I'd like, otherwise I would've been at AZM fest for sure!

I teach a "music appreciation" class of about 200 undergraduate non-music majors, and it's always fun to pop in Encomiast without telling them it's my composition, or some Masonna or something, and see what they think about it all. Everyone has a totally different reaction to things like that at first, and it's always interesting to talk it out.

SotM is a band I started with my friend Kirk on guitar and vocals, while I play bass, vocals, and manage Xylophobe, the amorphous electronic entity that provides our percussion. Our main goal is to realize Xylophobe's ultimate vision and bring about the final Ceremony, in which Xylophobe can finally attain its true form. We're not entirely sure what will happen then, but we know that the death toll will be staggering as all within earshot will perish from the sheer glorious justice of it all. Luckily for us and the neighborhood, we have yet to execute the ritual flawlessly in live performance.

We actually just finished laying down tracks for a new recording entitled "Jouissance d'Baphomet" at a friend's studio and we're going to begin mixing in a couple of weeks. We rerecorded a few of the tracks from our first demo and laid down three new ones. There's some truly ridiculous stuff in store, including cellos, odd flute overdubs, and some live percussion tracks. Once we get this one in the can, it'll be time yet again to try and get some label somewhere to help us release it. We're also working on a video series entitled "Contemplative Satanism: Awakening the Inverted Cross Within," a lifestyle and meditation program that puts you in touch with your inner demon through a series of Necro-yogic practices and selfish acts that will open the Blackened Channels of Dong Chi, strengthen the Will, and tone the loins in preparation for the Goat of a Thousand Young!

I remember liking the word because it has an association with both a sort of somber, funereal vibe, as an encomium is a tribute not unlike a eulogy. At the same time, it also connotates a measure of inappropriate flattery or toadying.Ā I like that ambiguity...I think it also allows for a measure of stylistic flexibility. I happened on the word entirely by chance, though.

I usually say something like "atmospheric or environmental sounds with a penchant for oppressive textures." I just try to be descriptive of the kinds of sounds I use and the ultimate effect I'm going for. I think that works best for someone who's a total newcomer to the genre. It doesn't make for much of a pick-up line though. In some ways it's easier to explain Encomiast to a neophyte than trying to explain it to an aficionado. I don't know the scene as well as I should and sometimes end up just smiling and nodding when asked about particular artists that I should know about because I happen to sound like them.

Generally, it's been sort of a hybrid of late. I'll use acoustic sound sources to start with and then manipulate and arrange them in Cool Edit or Cubase. [laurentide] was a LOT more hardware based, though. For the beginning, I recorded a lot of the individual tracks "live" with my bass, sampler, an old dictation machine, and my effects pedals. Later in the album things got a lot more computer-driven, effects-wise, but I was still dealing with live and often improvised material. I find that method gives things a sort of inner tension that comes through all the effects, as the original source was kind of unsteady in its execution.

Well, I knew I needed to go there, since that was sort of where I started with this project. The stuff I've done since then is maybe not quite so dark. I'm not always quite sure where a track is going to end up when I start it, since a lot of the time I'm working with raw materials that are going to end up unrecognizable in the final product. None of the other collections I have in the can are really that similar to [laurentide], and the ideas I've been mulling over lately may or may not continue down this path, depending on how they turn out. But it'll always be a part of what I do, regardless.

Boulder is an odd town for music because while it has a reputation as being a "good" music town, it's also very difficult to get anything going that's outside of stuff they might play at a yuppie or hippie bar. There's a lot of acoustic jammy folk music up here that's occasionally interesting, like my friend's 1920s-style string band, but overall the scene is quite bland. Most of the audiences and venue owners just want something unobtrusive and safe. There's a small group of people here doing wonderfully odd electronic shit though, like my friend Red Spector who does all sorts of great music using an old Atari Falcon and a slew of homemade programs. I've gotten a lot of support for both Encomiast and SotM from a hard techno crew up here that's into tossing all kinds of stuff together to see what happens. Denver's got the Page27 and Carrion Crawler fellows, who I've done gigs with both as Encomiast and with SotM. They're a solid group of noisicians, grindheads, and great folks all around. I don't get to as many shows in Denver as I'd like, but it seems like good shows happen every few weeks.

I can't think of a way that mp3s have hindered Encomiast...actually the old mp3.com was where I first got started doing this, and the people I've encountered through online networks have ultimately allowed Encomiast to release, so online music has certainly done a lot for me. The only problem I see with file sharing is that, at least in college towns like Boulder, it makes it very difficult for music retailers of any type to do business since all their customers download albums instead of purchasing them. One guy that runs a local store that's been around for 20 years or so has told me that any copies of an album that he has after the first week will never sell because the kids who bought them put them up on the university network. I think there's something wrong with that. While I'm all for the technology, I hope that somebody figures out a way for retailers to deal with these problems, since a good independent record store provides a scene with a focal point and staging ground that is sorely missed otherwise.

Ā By virtue of its liberation from the tensile and acoustic limitations of traditional instrumentation, electronica has spilled its steely embrace far and wide into the realm of sonic landscapes. Much of it, of course, still relies on what we would consider the basic components of musicā€”rhythm, harmony, melodyā€”and much of it, ironically, is produced precisely to replicate traditional instrumentation at lower cost and improved precision. But machines aren't particularly dogmatic in their rendering of sonic substance, and none of them go to school to learn discipline or musical theory, so the outer fringes of niche electronica can paint portraits of stunningly alien landscapes.

Ross Hagen, who records under the name Encomiast (what the American Heritage Dictionary defines as, "A person who delivers or writes an encomium; a eulogist,") is a frequent traveler across this terrain. A grad student at the University of Colorado College Of Music, Hagen has a handful of recordings to his credit. The latest, laurentide, released by Beauty and Pain Records, embraces the slow-wave, metallic drone of dark ambient aesthetics. The single, 53-minute title track groans and winces in its excruciatingly measured evolution. Swelling, harmonically ambiguous tones oscillate in an elegant but time-suspended ether, flits of surface noise appear and vanish around the edges. The bottom sinks ever further from sight, until another texture rises to take its place, folded and uncertain, with the suggestion of desperate, quarter-speed voices at the frontiers of audibility.

It's a barren place that Hagen describes, in this and the other recordings he has dedicated to CD, as being filled with foreboding and primal darkness and unflinching solitude.

Hagen, who also plays guitar and frequently works some treated guitar noise into his pieces, comes across as a tinkerer, though, not so much a portraitist of the damned. A music major from Davidson College in North Carolina, Hagen's original musical influences leaned a bit more toward the traditional.

"I guess I first got exposed to electronic music through my dad, who was a big Hearts Of Space fan," he says. "He also had a lot of obscure records in his collectionā€”Captain Beefheart, stuff like that. Pretty eclectic. I remember seeing Koyanasqattsi when I was like 8. I think that had an influence as well.

"I was in a metal band in high school. We played stuff like Type O Negative and Queensryche, pretty much anything we could pull off," he continues. "But once I got to college, I really started listening to a lot of industrial music and messing around in the teaching studio there."

But like so much of the niche market in music these days, Hagen says that his real entry into serious composing and recording probably started with MP3.com.

"That's where I met people and realized there was a whole community of performers and listeners who liked this stuff," he says. "You made connections out there. You had access to people who wanted to hear what you were doing. It was really a community, and I made some lasting associations there."

And while what Hagen produces comes across as a deeply cerebral conspiracy, the process of noise texturing against a demonically slowed stopwatch, Hagen's primary recording MO is the live performance. He's done several gigs locally, most recently at Denver's Old Curtis Bar, and frequently records with other players, like flautist Megan Garland. An upcoming release, Masked Mirrors, will feature treatments of improvised recordings made at the Belvedere Theater in Central City last spring, with a mixture of electronics and piano soundboard. Even [laurentide] was constructed of treatments of improvised live performances.

"I really like things that are the product of the moment, you know?" he says. "There's something about the spontaneity."

But that means most of this stuff is essentially irreproducible. The basic components are assembled on the fly and then textured and assembled later. At what point, we wonder, does it cease being intentioned music and just becomes noise?

"Well, there's a lot of stuff out there that I think is pretty uninspired," says Hagen. "And as a theory teacher pointed out in college, without boundaries, you can't be creative. So, yeah, it's finding that balance between abstraction and discipline. I like to sort of jump back and forth across that line."