All the Circles Have Circling

Whispered phrases from Gertrude Stein, beats inspired by Timbaland, harmonies hearkening to Bjork. The miracle of music is bringing these disparate elements together and creating something new and whole. All the Circles Have Circling is a celebration of cycles, loops, spinning, and returning again. The opening, middle, and closing sections of the piece feature short excerpts from Stein's poem "If I Told Him" ("If I told him would he like it..."). They're whispered in a way that evokes both a shared secret and also an anxious ritual of sorts. In Stein's poem, "If I Told Him," she turns a handful of phrases around each other until they stop feeling like sentences and start feeling like raw, expressive patterns. Linguists call this phenomenon "semantic satiation": the feeling when words briefly lose their meaning when overly repeated and become pure sound. By the end of the piece, the whispered lines should dissolve into a hushed, abstracted, purely musical experience. The beats of super-producer Timbaland feature lots of space, stuttered rhythms, and unusual samples that range from bundles of sticks to vocal sounds. Though Im not directly quoting any particular track, "All the Circles" takes inspiration from his halting, skipping rhythms along with the use of sticks hitting, fingers snapping, and drum shells clicking. His production philosophy is also consistent with the transformation of Stein's words into rhythms and sounds. As for Bjork's song "Unravel," I just love it. Its elegance and vulnerability is so moving, not to mention the gorgeous interplay of melody against a thin, exposed bass line (which I transform into the low ostinato heard at the beginning). The song's theme of love as a winding and unwinding ball of yarn is a perfect match for what became the central premise of "All the Circles." Namely circles. When searching for a title, I turned to a fragment from another Stein poem. In her collection Tender Buttons (1914), nestled in the poem "Roastbeef" lay the phrase "and all the circle has circling." This idea of circles gave me the conceptual glue I had been looking for. Circularity, it turns out, is one of the most persistent ways we make sense of being alive. "What goes around comes around"; "You can't step in the same river twice"; "History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.""All the Circles" tries to capture both the attraction to those ideas and the suspicion hidden within them. In terms of structure, "All the Circles" is fairly traditional. You've got your A- and B-themes, which recur and develop across distinct sections. There's motifs passed across different instruments and ranges. One section returns almost exactly as first heard; others return heavily varied, another is transformed into an explosive percussion break. The piece ends as it began, with the "if I told you" phrases whispered over a final brass chord. Fun fact, if you imagine the band immediately starting the piece over again, you'll find it forms a seamless loop. This final implied circle is the culmination of those disparate inspirational references being put through the "spin" cycle; and it reminds us to take stock of what remains and what's been transformed after the spinning stops.