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Kenneth Michael Florence: Seven Steps

from Tourmaline by Dylan Ward Saxophone

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  • Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    4 panel wallet with one disc and 12 page booklet

    Includes unlimited streaming of Tourmaline via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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about

Kenneth Michael Florence is a composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist from Raleigh, North Carolina. He holds a bachelor’s degree in music composition from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and a master’s from Mannes, The New School. Formerly the lead guitarist in NC-based indie rock band Annuals, Florence has performed nationally and around the world at major festivals like Bonnaroo, Coachella, Glastonbury, and Roskilde. He currently focuses primarily on creating music and sound design for film, podcasts, and other media. Additionally, Florence maintains a solo singer-songwriter project, plays in two Brooklyn-based bands, and collaborates with various artists of many genres as producer, arranger, and performer.

Seven Steps is a concept piece based on one of the many formulations of the Gnostic creation myth. In this particular schema, the creation of the world involves a descent through eight heavenly realms or beings, collectively referred to as the Ogdoad. With each step downward, creation moves farther away from the highest being. The final step sparks the creation of the physical world, which manifests as a kind of skewed reflection of the Ogdoad.

In the piece, the saxophone represents consciousness, a kind of ever-present witness and participant in the unfolding cosmogonic drama. The piece is divided into eight sections (representing the Ogdoad), the tempos of which are related to each other by increasingly complex numeric ratios.

A “timekeeper” track runs throughout the pre-recorded playback, representing the “holy spirit” and providing a constant beat against which these ratios are perceived. The final step into the last section of the piece brings about a ratio of 64:63 of the timekeeper to the new tempo. This effect, combined with the return of the thematic material from section one, represents the “physical world as skewed reflection” concept—this reflected copy is almost the same as the original, but doesn’t quite line up with it exactly. Creation attains only to the likeness of the unmanifest.

credits

from Tourmaline, released June 8, 2022
Kenneth Michael Florence — guitars, pianos, and electronics

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Dylan Ward Saxophone Charlotte, North Carolina

Dylan Ward holds a DMA from the University of Missouri–Kansas City, where he served as a graduate teaching assistant to Zach Shemon. Ward’s creative work explores ideas of existential intelligence across natural, human, digital, and historical consciousnesses and the novel ways in which they coalesce. ... more

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