Hey Exit – Cutting Pitch (Lens 2)

The Cutting Pitch EP (and its predecessor, Lens) was conceived around a favorite writing exercise: Come up with 30 ideas (that don’t suck) in a single session. I wanted to make music that would imply, rather than assert. My goal was to conceive of 30 ideas and give them each proper, respectful treatment: Form each idea fully, title them meaningfully, record good takes, mix and master the release as I would any other. Each track was to feel like looking through a keyhole into the world of a song you couldn’t hear.

Compared to Lens' summery, upbeat feel, Cutting Pitch was a decidedly colder affair – though no less playful. Same idea, but this time stern, psychedelic, otherworldly. (Yes I was listening to a lot of black metal at the time.) I asked myself: How far could I stretch out an idea in this format before it stopped implying a song? The answer is probably somewhere in these tracks.

As it happens, I never did elaborate on any of these tracks, preferring to think of the collection as a whole piece – finished, in a way. There’s a quote from that page out of Thelonious Monk’s notebook that says, "Don't play everything (or every time); let some things go by. Some music just imagined. What you don't play can be more important than what you do." Cool.