Electronic and acoustic music, warped, honed and evolving across the realms of how-to’s of anythi
Mirror Shards is a solo music project directed and based on the creative efforts of composer/percussionist Joe Formanek. Varied and multidisciplinary throughout time, exemplified by certain conceptual and technical approaches. Mirror Shards demonstrates the exercise of a developed concept, auto-history, which can be understood as a methodology to improvisation, composition and live performances th
at keeps constant sonic contact with the artists former self via a database of recordings bound by homogeneous recordings sessions, thus the music being not only a composition of a single moment but of several moments throughout the artist’s life, ranging from recording sessions for these compositions, to improvisations with friends, to field recordings on holiday trips, conclusively allowing a new way to reflective insight into the time-based evolution of the artist’s personal development. Technically, Joe employs an electroacoustic apparatus which is at once a laptop-drumset using digital signal processing and the necessary database for auto-history. In live performances, with a collection of recorded improvisations and compositions organized onto this database, the most distinctive characteristic of Mirror Shards is the quality of improvising with the history of one’s self. Another interpretation could be on how Mirror Shards is rooted in similar disciplinary mindsets as musician/composer Anthony Braxton, Steve Lehmann and Vijay Iyer, tackling the age old question of combining improvisation with composition. After many years of honing conventional and especially unconventional skills as a drummer and as an electronic musician, Joe demonstrates an exercise of concepts, such as the interplay of time and non-time based styles, traditional and extended instrumental techniques, field recordings, micro sampling, and sophisticated software resampling. This is a highly collaborative project and has been involved with Francisco Lopez (composer), Chris Formanek (composer), François Ducat (film director), Hervé Perez (sax, composer), Camille-Alban Spreng, (pianist, composer), Akito van Troyer (sound artist, composer), Elm Records Collective, and Mangoest Records.
