by Howard Martin

n: First off, the studio we recorded in was my previous home in Cambridge, MA. So, the environment was casual, and there was no clock ticking away the dollars. The recordings were made in three spontaneous sessions spaced over a year. We used two pieces from the first session for our tracks on the Tiny Mix Tapes Darfur compilation and our split 7" with Skeletons Out, but we really had no intention of recording an album. It wasn't until I came across the recordings from the second session (which I had almost completely forgotten about) almost a year later that I started to hear the thread of continuity that makes these six pieces work together.

I think that any change in environment changes the approach to improvising in some way, though that change isn't always significant. The difference between performing for a live audience and no audience (or an imagined, future audience), however, is fairly important: the aspect of ritual is removed, rending certain performative actions useless. We never discussed how to handle the change, so whatever we did to adjust was organic and probably very psychologically complicated. At the same time, we've grown up listening to recordings and have never taken an ideological stance against them, so it's hardly miraculous that we would tweak our music in some way to adjust to the medium (not to mention that we've each been in the studio many times for other projects). It's probably not risking too much interpretation to say that we played in a more concise fashion with more attention to musical content than a performative aura, but that shouldn't imply that listening to the resulting music won't make five minutes seem like thirty or that any kind of mystical reaction is off the table.

n: It's extremely rare (and even more rarely successful) that we discuss any sort of framework prior to playing. And, while it's possible that there is some kind of imagery at play in some of our sound choices, I think that most of the choices are rhythm- and frequency-based. That shouldn't dictate the way you hear the music, though. The fact that there is no single image or mood or framework at the source allows for continually evolving interpretations. I hope that the music can be made new with each listening and with each new listener.

I like this idea of a continual shift from macro to microscopic. I want to hear simultaneous opposites: a sustained note that is pure and slow while the body of air running through it is rapid and complex; or a mood of detachment that is simultaneously passionate and engaged. When the opposites are so near to each other, there is more possibility in the transition from one phrase to the next. I think this is what Ornette is talking about when he talks about Harmelodics: you can look at any individual note in a melodic phrase and fit it into countless harmonic possibilities. If you look at three notes, there are fewer possibilities. Twelve notes, far fewer. You can make the choice at any given moment how many notes you want to take into account to justify your next move. By making evocative but vague timbral choices, we can accomplish a similar, ongoing flow of radical possibilities without dealing with traditional harmony at all.

n: If I understand your question correctly, yes. Each piece is a single performance.

n: There is almost no post-production work on this record aside from standard eq and dynamics processing, none of which were employed to radically change the sound. Some editing was done to remove the occasional environmental disturbance (thunderstorms and neighbors, for the most part).

We really wanted to present a straightforward recording of what the core duo of nmperign is up to, and I resisted very heavily the temptation to over-edit and over-produce this music. The production choices are basically about track selection: what tracks best furthered the long form of the album. So, there are a number of takes that aren't on the CD, either because the performance was not up to our standards or the feel was outside the scope of this album or the idea of the track was better expressed in a different piece.

n: We titled the record after the recordings were made, though the seed for Ommatidia was planted while I was putting the pieces together. I was using a working title of "Variations" because I liked the very plain way it described both the recurrence of certain sounds and the kind of fluid continuity between the pieces. But no one involved could really handle all the baggage that comes with "Variations", so we got together to brainstorm a title. It was a major struggle finding a word or words to get at the idea of the music without drowning it in metaphor or sarcasm. But we finally latched onto the image of a compound eye and all the connotations of fragmentation and reconstruction. From there, it was just a matter of research to get to Ommatidia. And though Ommatidia is a more beautiful word than Variations, there is still a certain plainness to it that keeps it from over-defining the music.

Bhob: Lately, I've been revisiting Artaud's "Selected Wrtings," as well as a book by Giorgio Agamben called "The Man Without Content." I get from these books what I get from most of the art I truly love, which is a sense that the things I desperately value in life are also valued by other people; so much so that someone has been willing to bring form to some cloudy desire or intuition that, on its own, was more of a nagging itch than an idea. Living in any kind of society, we are coerced into tacit agreements regarding what should not be thought or addressed; some artists are especially skilled at excavating those prohibited ideas that are vital to the individual or, at least, to an honest assessment of reality. I'll take more of that, please.

Greg: I've always held the contention that 95% of everything is garbage. 95% of architecture, 95% of the human race, 95% of vegetable matter, ad nauseum. And while I gladly welcome evidence to the contrary (off the top of my head, I can think of hundreds of cases where this would come easily), it's that golden 5% that is the carrot on a string from which I hope to find form to the cloudy desires and intuitions Bhob mentions above.

Unfortunately, this contention also means that there is something to be gained from 5% of everything, which begets a perverse obligation to investigate even the most sundry areas. Even when filtered through my own particular interests and predilections, this generally leads to over-stimulation and, as I've just learned from Wikipedia, "It is hypothesized and commonly believed by some that psychological habituation to a high level of stimulation ('over-stimulation') can lead to psychological problems." To avoid such "sensory overload" or potential "burnout," restrictions must be applied. So, *hypothetically speaking*, one might decide to only buy new music or books from Target. This limits the possibilities. There are no "Modern Classical" or "Avant Garde" sections in Target's recorded music department to confuse one prone to overstimulation. In fact, there's not even a "Jazz" section or a "Classical" section, which can be very comforting when faced with the potential "psychological problems" caused by "habituation to a high level of stimulation." But it also means you'd have to go elsewhere to pick up a copy of "The Drop Edge of Yonder" by Rudolph Wurlitzer, which I'm about 60 pages into.

What's next for nmperign?

n: We have a 1-sided LP with Jake Meginsky called "Selected Occasions of Handsome Deceit" coming out on Rel Records very soon. There is some very fine music on there (Jake is an amazing musician), and the package should be quite beautiful. We have plans to do a full-length with Jake and also with Sean Meehan.

Bhob: Since I've very recently relocated to New Orleans, there hasn't been a lot of rock solid planning for a tour. But there has been whispering, and I know that, once the dust settles, we'll get on the road and make some more music.


"Ommatidia" is out now on Intransitive Recordings.