Distances

Please Note: This album's official release was January 1st, 2016. The digital version was released to PledgeMusic in October of 2015. To get the real story on this album, you can visit Claude's site. http://www.claude.works and see how this album came about. And now that we got that out of the way, you can take a glimpse into the mind of the artist himself: The decay of places past always call out to me. I often wonder at the stories imprinted within the crumbling remains of what was. The dreams of men and women lost, left behind on a fallen wall, or abandoned completely to keep the secrets they will never utter. I record this silence. Perhaps it is the absence of sound that beckons me to these places. No lightbulbs. No television. No computer. But on occasion, a photograph, or pages from a book. Even a wedding dress... The road is filled with places like this, spanning one mile to the next, one empty dwelling at odds with another. Always a story and an image to be drawn from them. And from these journeys experiences, colors and notes arise from the dead.  Contrary to this, the paintings reflect an internal questioning of this silence. They try to become the meta physical emotion I feel revealed as form and color. I am particular to structure. Lines that connect us. The expressions on statues I meet but never speak to. There is a distance to be crossed from experienced silence to the painted image and recorded sound. I do my best to listen as I become physical with the work. To absorb. To remember. Always recording. I ask myself if the distance between happiness and sadness is near or far from the experience. Or perhaps there is no distance at all, both existing as co-habitants vying for control within us all. These are the distances I explore. The abandoned buildings demand it. The stories untold lament it, as loneliness of the heart is as silent as an abandoned apartment. Its wires no longer transmitting signal. And then there is sound. Even from a heartbeat, it is musical. There was always an unspoken sort of magic to be found in the sounds that people don’t think of as musical, such as the hum of an electric motor, or the sound of an electrical circuit not working properly. The chirping of a computer modem trying to connect. Time code. Hard Disk Failures. Synthesis. Digital symbiosis. Like the abandoned places, sounds hold secrets I must pull from them. Or from myself by way of these machines that reproduce the sounds in my mind. Remembering. Just like the structures, they too have witnessed countless dreams. Some that stayed dreams, others that became conjured as curses or pleasure. Sound is a consequence of experiences. My only way of conveying is recording them. Using these machines. Going on the journeys. Braving the distances of thought. Crossing into the unknown. Distances.