About ThinAirX
ThinAirX is my solo act. I’m Steve Bowman; I live in Media, PA, near Philadelphia, USA.
The music on this site is the culmination of 50 years of my composing, performing, listening to, studying, and thinking about music. All kinds of music. Though I have a classical background, for the last 30 years I’ve limited my composing and performing exclusively to electronic music performed on keyboards and synths. A few years ago I added electrified clarinet to my act.
The sounds of ThinAirX music—all electronically generated—range from ambient and dreamy to raucous noise. Harmonies from modal to atonal. Melodies from chromatic angularity to singing themes. Sometimes all in the same piece.
Where does ThinAirX music come from?
All ThinAirX tracks are my compositions. They aren’t scored note-by-note (been there, done that). They’re composed as flexible arrangements designed for live performance. The compositions are structured with beginnings/middles/ends and distinct themes, sections, and transitions, the arrangements leave plenty of room for improvising to capture the energy of the moment. They’re like “head arrangements” in jazz. It’s electronic music with a jam-band sensibility. As in jazz—or live Grateful Dead—each performance of a named piece is different, a unique instance of the core composition.
The sounds originate from synthesizers I trigger using piano-style keyboards—standard practice for electronic music. The distinctive ThinAirX sound comes from the extreme ways I manipulate the notes coming out of the synths. Timbres are twisted and transformed with a battery of modulation effects, and then multiplied and layered with pitch shifters, delays, loopers, and anything else I have in my bag of electronic tricks.
I push the electronics to the limit intentionally to create music never heard before. When I’m improvising, I’m not just improvising the melodies and harmonies. I’m also experimenting with tonal qualities and layering, exploring all the new textures, combinations, and surprises this new technology can create. Digital technology is so new and so deep, composers and musicians are just beginning to realize its potential for generating truly new music. I’m doing what I can to advance the art.
Sometimes I play a regular clarinet as the sound source. The clarinet’s familiar, woody sound is expanded and warped with electronics in the same way the synth-generated sounds are. My second album Mouth Feel was created this way, exclusively—no keyboards or synths. Using clarinet as the source gives a supple expressiveness to the melodic lines that pure electronics can’t achieve. When playing the clarinet, I’m literally breathing life into the music.
All my performances are recorded directly to stereo (no multi-tracking or over-dubbing). Most of the tracks you hear on my albums are single performances, lightly edited to remove glitches, or spliced-together sections from two or three different performances of the same piece. A few are montages: recompositions drawn from multiple performances (and indicted as such in the track notes). What you hear in these tracks is close to how ThinAirX sounds in live performance.
“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”
How to listen to ThinAirX
If you’re familiar with the electronic music genre, don’t expect ThinAirX to be more of the same. It’s not sequencer driven, and it’s not beats (two distinct schools of e-music). It’s more intricately detailed and varied than most commercial electronic music you hear today. It’s not dance music. It rewards repeated listenings.
I’ve invented a new genre, “electro-symphonic music”, to reflect the broad scope of both my music and my ambitions.
Electro-symphonic Music
My music has two parents. First is my life-long fascination with a very wide range of musical epochs and genres, old and new. I hold a degree in Music from Harvard, where I gained a deep understanding and abiding love for classical music. All western classical music! Starting with medieval and renaissance sacred music (Dufay, Palestrina, Joaquin), through the 300-year golden age of tonal music (Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, etc.), and with a particular fixation on the atonal, experimental, radical music of the 20th century (Ives, Bartok, Stockhausen, Ligeti, Subotnick, Reich). And I’m not just being academic: all this music is in the Spotify playlists I listen to every day.
Frankly, I wish we could all retire the term “classical music.” It’s an artificial distinction that does more harm than good, bunching centuries of widely diverse music into one category, yet at the same time walling out more recent music that’s just as exciting as what came before, only for different reasons. I prefer to view the whole sweep of music as a continuum, from 12th century polyphony at Notre Dame to techno music at Burning Man. It’s all music, expressing human ideas and feelings, adapted to the culture and technology of the times.
From an early age I’ve sought out experimental, radical, non-classical music (Miles Davis, Zappa, Beefheart, Sun Ra, and live Grateful Dead). I continue to seek out new music, including electronic dance music (trance, IDM, techno, etc.). I make an annual pilgrimage to the Big Ears Festival to stay current. In my student years I played keyboards in rock bands, jazz bands, and party bands. I’ve studied African drumming. Now, my goal is to employ digital technology to manifest the musical ideas and compositional insights I’ve accumulated over a lifetime of listening to and studying music.
The second parent is my love of electronic sounds. Ever since I discovered a modular synth in the attic of the music building at Harvard, I’ve been fascinated by the blips and beeps of oscillators and filters and modulators. Electronics was also the solution to my frustration with writing “dots on paper” as the only way to create art music. Through the years I’ve grown with the technology, playing and performing first on analog hardware synths, and later on computer-based instruments. Now, enabled by the mind-boggling sophistication of new music apps developed for iOS, all my music (except for the clarinet) is generated on an iPad. iOS is, in my opinion, superior to all other ways of creating electronic music. It’s the next frontier.
What have these two parents begotten? Electro-symphonic music. Electronic music with roots in both the history Western music and the long tradition of musical experimentation. It’s entirely new music, but with precedent. Which means, when you listen to ThinAirX you can demand more than you would from most electronic music.
What it Sounds Like
Some of what you hear is soothingly ambient, tonal, dreamy, trippy. I’ve had people tell me it takes them on inward journeys. Others say it makes them feel floaty, like swimming in beautiful colors and watching “rubbery shapes.”
But be prepared, too, for stretches that are atonal, raucous, dense—complex sounds and textures that sometimes devolve into pure noise. People tell me it reminds them of soundtracks for scary movies or science fiction.
Some tracks move between the two extremes, and the transitions are an essential part of the journey.
I know that for many listeners the “wrong notes”—the dissonance, atonality and chromaticism—make them uncomfortable. On the other hand, listeners accustomed to atonality in jazz or 20th century classical music will recognize what I’m doing. Still, even these people balk at the sounds that aren’t notes at all—the prickly textures and industrial noise. They ask me if I’m angry.
I’m not angry. My love of dissonance and noise comes from my love for the whole school of radical and experimental 20th century composers, such as Ligeti, Ives, Stockhausen and Zappa, who evolved a new musical language both to reflect the modern zeitgeist and as a reaction to the excesses of tonal classical music in the previous century.
I’m convinced that anybody with a seasoned ear and the willingness to withhold judgment can discover new and fulfilling excitement in this radical music. The key is to listen closely to the details, visualize the evolving shapes and colors, and trace the stories unfolding in the sound. I’m on a mission to open your ears, not just to my music but also to the adventurous composers and styles I’m emulating.
To get the most out of these tracks, try to disassociate your ears from movie soundtrack conventions. Most people still associate pure electronic sounds with outer space (which is why the label “space music” persists, despite that fact that there is absolutely no sound in space). Everybody who’s seen a scary movie associates discordant, spooky sounds with pending danger. Try to get beyond these cliché associations that, in my opinion, trivialize a whole realm of fascinating music.
Instead, listen to the sounds just as pure sounds. With a little practice you will hear the discords and atonality as beautiful in their own right. The extreme noise is an acquired taste, but has the added benefit of opening your ears to a new way of listening not just to music, but to any sounds.
Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments.
John Cage, 1937
What to Listen For
Most people have no idea how electronic music is made. You will enjoy ThinAirX more if you know what to listen for. Unlike conventional instrumental music, the effects applied to the initial notes are just as important as the pitches and durations of the notes themselves.
The sound source for most electronic music is either pitches synthesized using oscillators and filters or originating as recorded samples of actual sounds—for example, if you hear a realistic piano sound, each note was sampled separately from a real piano by the app developers. The source can also be a guitar or orchestral instrument with a pickup (e.g. a clarinet, cello). These source sounds are then modulated with an array of electronics—for example, phase shifters, flangers, ring modulators, grain delays—to create voices with distinctive timbres, to shape the timing of the notes (attacks, decay, sustain, release), and to create movement within the tone itself (e.g. phasing).
Some of the notes are triggered directly from pressing keys on a keyboard, exactly as a pianist does to play a piano. Some are generated automatically by a sequencer, which outputs pre-composed melody fragments that are repeated over and over. Some by an arpeggiator, which outputs simple patterns triggered by single notes played in real time on the keyboard—for example, play a Bb and hear a broken (arpeggiated) Bb chord, either once or repeatedly. I rarely use sequencers, but employ a bank of arpeggiators playing back at different speeds.
However the notes are generated, they can be expanded further into musical shapes and textures using a battery of effects. One of my favorites is delay. Non-musicians call it “echo.” The circuitry repeats a note multiple times and lowers the volume with each repeat, creating the illusion of receding into the distance. As you listen, notice the delays and how they give depth and dimension to the overall sound.
Loopers are central to my setup. Loopers resemble delays in that they repeat passages as they’re played, once or many times. But loopers repeat longer segments, up to a minute or so. The loops can repeat indefinitely, or fade gradually as more looped layers are added. (Not to be confused with “loops” used in techno music, which are pre-recorded audio snippets repeated and layered—for example, drum loops.)
Pitch shifting is an effect most noticeable when applied to a relatively pure sound, like a guitar or voice or clarinet. You can hear the original pitch plus one or more simultaneous (or slightly delayed) instances of the same note shifted up or down—for example, an octave above or below. With pitch shifting I can simulate vocal harmonies or create wildly dense and evolving tone clusters.
Another effect I enjoy is reverse audio--like the reverse tape effects the Beatles made famous. Short reverses (created by a special delay setting) add a zip to the tail of the sound. Longer reverses (created by a looper) not only reverse the audio, but also the order of the notes—a rising melody becomes a descending melody, for example.
The illusion of space is a hallmark of electronic music. Echos (from delays) put you into deep canyons. Heavy reverb (“reverberation”) conjures big halls, cathedrals, warehouses. Panning—moving sounds dynamically between the left and right channels—broadens the sound stage and keeps your ears guessing where the next sound will pop up. All of these effects are commonly employed in commercial music recordings, but as slight, barely noticeable sweetening of the instruments or vocals. In electronic music, effects are exaggerated to the point where they are a defining characteristic of the genre.
Combining, cross-modulating and layering any or all of these effects, or pushing the settings to their extremes, can create really interesting noise—sounds not discernable as musical notes. Noise music is an accepted musical genre. How do you know the difference between good noise music and just plain noise? When noise music is good, it’s multi-layered, intricately detailed, and constantly morphing and twisting and changing—and very satisfying to listen to.
Infinite Combinations
Electronic music technology is a huge and complex field, with more effects and sound sources than I can list and infinite ways they can be combined. And, with the ascension of the iPad as a music platform, talented iOS developers are constantly inventing new ways to create, shape, organize and alter the sound. High-resolution touchscreens, wireless controllers, and powerful digital processors are revolutionizing how musicians interact with their instruments.
Just as importantly, the musician can control any and all of the parameters of each of the synthesizers and effects, as presets and in real time. For example, I have a virtual knob for delay volume and another for decay rate—for every one of my many delays. There are a dozen controls for each of my four loopers. That’s what all those knobs and sliders and foot pedals are for. I have a single iPad dedicated exclusively to controlling the other iPad that actually generates the sounds.
All this control is both a blessing and a curse. It’s exciting to have all those sounds and effects at my fingertips. But it’s also easy to be overwhelmed by the complexity, to lose control and create an incoherent sonic mess. It’s a perennial challenge for the electronic musician, and requires discipline, thousands of individual technical and musical decisions, and years of practice to tame advanced electronics into a personal musical instrument that sounds like nobody else.
That’s why I believe that we’ve only just begun to explore all the new ways this new music can be composed and performed. Listen to my tracks with the same spirit of adventure and exploration that I have creating them and you’ll share my excitement. There’s a lot here to hear.