Listen to Connectedness and purchase on Bandcamp.
If you let it, music will soak into every part of your life. Music mirrors the universe — mysterious, rigorous, emotional, sublime — and thus naturally glues together one’s whole experience of life. It has something to contribute in every area: the intellectual, the social, the sacred, the corporeal; and yet, despite all these prongs, music is an inseparable mass, a continuous fluid that resists any attempt to discretize or classify it. That we can harness the energy of music at all is a human miracle, an endless source of gratitude. The composer-builder Harry Partch is right on when he declares, “Music is Magic.”
The power to conjure music, then, is proof of the majesty of humanity. Along with language, religion, and mathematics, music brings out the human spirit’s tendency to bite off more than it can chew, to create and wield technology that we don’t fully understand. Abstraction meets urgency; the heart directs the hand. Mercifully, no one is alone in any musical quest. We absorb and filter knowledge from teachers living and dead, and then we combine our efforts in ensembles. With friends, music turns into a simultaneously challenging and forgiving group ritual that strings together millions of moments, countless half-decisions carried out by an emergent democratic organism. What we capture on tape is a projection of that process, recompiled and refracted by the listener’s ear — which is to say that you, the listener, are not merely an observer; you are playing with us, letting it soak into part of your life, which surely has something to say about our music, consciously or otherwise. And whatever you say or feel about a recording sheds new light on what one might naïvely think of as “the same” piece of music. This generates a new variant for each listener’s experience. Musicians know that the identity of a piece of music contains all of those variants, past and future — a vast, multidimensional web that far overshadows whatever composition or planning went in originally. These webs, moreover, have structures and textures that bewilder and inspire in equal measures.
The mathematician Benoit B. Mandelbrot, in the 1960s, revealed that many natural as well as mathematical phenomena are characterized by a fundamental infinite “roughness." One cannot simply measure the straightened-out length of a coastline nor the flattened-out surface area of the sea that defines it. There is detail at arbitrary levels of zoom, and hence the universe is not solely made up of 2- or 3-dimensional slices — the world is fractal in nature, with dimensionality floating somewhere between the counting numbers. So too with music: try to find where a note truly begins or ends, and you will come up against a rough, undefined barrier, more like tree bark than a man-made knife’s edge. Whole continuous lifetimes pass during phrases, and the spaces in between are just as pregnant and fragile as the notes they surround.
It's all one thing — one big action in defiance of sterile, boring silence.
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The music on Connectedness — born in Boston, reared in New York, with ancestry in Armenia, Austria, and Japan — is both for and about my friends Avery, Hayoung, and Simón. I wrote the music because they are my friends, but they are my friends because of the music. I accept the paradox in order to express something of my own personality through these special people. They judge me not when I bring in a transfiguration of music from Pokémon or a saxophone aria in a half-Persian, half-cowboy style. And in fact, they intensify such visions; they ripen the fruit of the heart and the mind by being open, musically conscientious people. For that I am immensely grateful, as I am to you for listening and thus being a part of the music-making process.
Jacob Shulman
Brooklyn, NY
Spring 2021
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Special thanks first and foremost to the band: to Avery, who shaped and texturized the music on big and small levels alike; to Hayoung, who pushed us all to make every moment the best it possibly could be, who didn’t take any detail for granted; to Simón, who played bass. Thanks to Kevin for watching over us, for trusting us when we earned it but weighing in when we most needed it. Thanks to Knar, who really heard the album for what it was and produced artwork that wasn’t just beautiful but also perfectly matched to the music. Thanks to Josh for creating a smooth, natural recording environment, and to Lee who fought valiantly both for and against me in order to produce the best sound I could have hoped for. And thanks to all family and friends, teachers and collaborators, inseparable characters in the great web of music.