Racer Session #418 | Griffin Boyd | April 15, 2018

Greetings, fans of the avant!

This weekend, dear friend and local composer Griffin Boyd will be presenting his first solo Racer Session. He has collaborated on presentations and participated in improvs in the past, and was a committed patron during our season of transition last October.

A native of Encinitas, CA and a graduate of Cornish's composition program, Griffin often utilizes keyboards, synths, guitars, and electronics when creating new work. It's been a while since he last premiered new works, and the session also falls on his birthday! These, among many others, are great reasons to find your way to Cafe Racer this Sunday at 8pm for his session. In the meantime, check out the wonderful blog that Griffin has written up for us. See you at Racer!

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"I am thrilled to be curating a Racer Session in the newly reopened space!

I have spent the past several months working in Max/MSP on an electronics rig quite different than any other I have built before. Much of my live electronic music output in the past has been focused on effects, sampling, and ambient textures.

While I love timbral experimentation, much of the music I'm listening to these days is angular and frenetic – so my goal has been to devise a rig that allows me to create dense and intricate music that interacts with the harmonic and rhythmic ideas in improvisation. I will be looping passages live and interweaving composed ideas and free improv. I have built this Max patch to analyze the pitch and rhythm of any motifs and accompany me with both aleatoric and sequential frameworks that will adapt to the content I play.

I have been coming to Racer for many years now and I cherish it as a staple of the Seattle DIY music scene. I co-curated a session back in 2015, but this is my first time presenting a solo project! I came to Seattle to study composition at Cornish, and have found the Table & Chairs and Racer community to be a natural extension of the boundary-pushing music I was surrounded by at school."