Eastern by Maurice Rickard

Since the beginning of 2014, I started making a new piece of music every week, inspired by the Weekly Beats community. After nearly a full decade of them, I've created over 500 pieces of music that wouldn't have otherwise existed.

Since mid-2021, many of these have been all-guitar pieces, in which the challenge is to create interesting music each week with just three or four tracks of the same guitar, straight to the board.

For many of these, I'd start by coming up with a melodic motive, and responding to it in another channel. Then another. Then I'd mute one and respond to the others. Eventually, there were a lot of little themes, and pieces emerged. In some cases, I had an overall sense of what I wanted to hear--often, in these, it was a sense of loose timing, and a piece coming together against a tension of pauses.

These pieces are from the last year and a few months, and they seem to share a kind of sensibility. Thank you for listening!

Maurice Rickard is a musician, sound artist, and Deep Listening Certificate holder based in Pittsburgh. He has a long history in improv and minimalist ambient work as snwv, but also abstract electronics. Most recently, he's been composing pieces for small ensembles of guitars.

onezeromusic.com
mauricerickard.com
yoctonaut.com