LE116

Michael Grigoni is a multi-instrumentalist who specialises in dobro, lap steel guitar, and pedal steel guitar. He has released several instrumental albums on Other Songs, and more recently, two albums on 12k, Mount Carmel and Slow Machines (with Stephen Vitiello). His latest album, Earth Awhile, is a collaboration with Chihei Hatakeyama and Stephen Vitiello on White Paddy Mountain.

Bill Seaman’s artworks often investigate a media-oriented poetics through various technological means. Such works often explore the combination and recombination of media elements and processes in interactive and generative works of art. Seaman enfolds image, music and text relations in these works, often creating all of the media elements and articulating the operative media-processes involved.

He played piano and worked on the arrangements for this track.
He is self taught as a musician.

Artist notes:

On April 8, 2022, Michael Grigoni accompanied a dance performance at the ChoreoLab Spring Dance Concert at Duke University. The performance was a work by Brooks Emanuel titled, ‘What Should We Do’, which arose out of a choreographic processes course taught at Duke by Michael Kliën. Grigoni’s accompaniment was an improvisation on lap steel guitar that responded to the movements of the dance ensemble, and it had a number of audio qualities related to room sound, the use of effects pedals, and the nature of the performance itself that Bill Bill Seaman felt would be amenable to his style of composition. Seaman constructed a sample library from selected fragments of the performance and then composed an initial pass of ‘The Long Sky’ using these samples, as well as samples from his own improvised piano performance. The piece then went through several iterations, with Michael adding additional lap steel from his home studio.

In ‘The Long Sky’, Grigoni and Seaman explore how elements of movement and dialogical exchange might be carried over from the space of an improvised music/dance performance to the arena of collaborative musical composition. Over the 2021–22 academic year, Grigoni participated in many such improvised dance performances in the context of Michael Kliën’s Lab for Social Choreography, providing music for choreographic situations involving both professional and non-professional dancers. He found that, within these performances, a feeling of openness, exploration, and experimentation naturally emerged between the musicians and dancers. ‘The Long Sky’ explores how these qualities, preserved and made accessible in the form of samples, might inform and structure a collaborative composition that centres dialogical exchange—a call and response between piano and lap steel guitar.


michaelgrigoni.com
billseaman.com