Modal Fixture
Modal Fixture is my first album as a songwriter. The music itself is comprised of succinct songs that are performed and arranged with a distinct blend of atmosphere and immediacy. Notable influences in songwriting and production aesthetic include Robert Lester Folsom, Wilco, and Dinosaur Jr.
The album title is a play on a music theory term, Modal Mixture, where you have a composition in a specific key and you substitute a chord with an altered version of it, switching out certain notes that are within the scale with others that are outside it.. This can happen when writing a minor chord in a context where it is expected to be major and vice versa, It can be used to subvert a listener’s expectation or to broaden a composition’s harmonic scope.
Anyways, I took a liking to the play on words it provided and was interested in thinking of the two words together in a more abstract sense. I like the idea of the words being at odds with each other, with something that is stable or fixed also being modal, modular, and variable.
In a way, I think the title relates to the lyrics in the songs, which each in their own way orbit around the ideas of living with abstractions and navigating ambiguity, recognizing the modal fixtures in life that are constant, ever-changing, and unknowable.
Written over 2016 - 2024, recorded from 2023-2024 in my home studio, previously located in Brooklyn and currently based in Chicago.
