Origins & Histories – Full Circle Time Machine

12/2011 @ Weirdo Records

Full Circle Time Machine is my duo project with Tara Mueller that we’ve been working on now since February 2011. We didn’t begin work as a duo proper until the fall, but we had both been students at New England Conservatory for a few years. One of the Contemporary Improvisation teachers (Violist Tanya Kalmanovitch) had been holding these great duo sessions, where anyone could show up, throw their name in a hat, and play a duo with another person whose name was drawn next to yours. Tanya held three or four of these sessions over the long blistery winter that year, one of which was during a storm projected to be so severe they cancelled classes and barely ran any trains.

During one of these “Duo or Die” sessions, Tara and I were assigned to play together, and I remember really liking it. We sort of knew each other, and we had both taken a class on American experimental music performance the previous fall. I’d been prone to seeking out players who enjoyed that repertoire, and this just seemed like something that needed to be explored more. 

So, any time I’d see Tara after that, our duo experience or something related to Tanya’s initiative would come up. For the rest of the semester, we talked about how it would be nice to play together again, but our paths never crossed in a way to make it work. Then something awesome happened:

I’m not sure who pointed me towards the singer/songwriter Daniel Johnston, but I got really interested in his music that summer, and Tara and I had started to talk about forming the duo. After watching TheDevil and Daniel Johnston, I bought Chord Organ from eBay, and forming a chord organ/violin duo with Tara was almost all I could think about for the rest of the summer. When the summer was over, this didn’t take long. We met a couple times, and our repertoire of original music and our improvisational rapport built pretty quickly. We’d get together to play, then go get a beer or make flyers for our “concerts” (the first was in front of four people in a second floor ensemble room at NEC). Shortly after, we started to play on student composer’s concerts, and a few other things at school. One of our first off-campus shows was in December at Weirdo Records in Cambridge. We did two or three shows there before they closed in 2015.

By the spring semester of 2012, Full Circle Time Machine was one of the pillars of my creative existence (the other was Burr Van Nostrand’s Voyage in a White Building I). Tara and I got to do a community outreach residency at an elementary school in JP that winter, and she came down to New Haven to meet and rehearse with Burr before we played a concert of his music in April. Also in April that year was the Contemporary Improvisation Department’s Beckett Play, and it was the first of three times that we would play together in Jordan Hall. 

5/25/2012 @ Yes Oui Si Space

The first concert we both gave after finishing school in May took place a few days after our graduation, at Yes Oui Si Space (a relatively short-lived gallery space that closed that summer). One of the most significant things about this project has been that consistently, we’ve performed in places that either no longer exist (Yes Oui Si, Weirdo Records), that we can no longer access (Jordan Hall), or have been present during times that seemed like significant personal milestones, for one reason or another. 

Though Tara would return to NEC for a masters, I was finished. The next fall (a year after we started playing regularly), I moved to VT, but made it a point to work in Boston as much as possible. VT was incredibly beautiful and livable, but there were fewer musical opportunities during the time I lived there. So, we would get to play every 6 weeks or so, and by that time we were pretty close. Tara had been dating Andrew Chilcote for the same amount of time we’d been working as a duo, so to go to Boston, see them, and meet some of their friends I didn’t know was always wonderful. This has continued to be the case from an even greater distance.

One time this sense of community served an especially important function was in April 2013, surrounding the Boston Marathon bombing. I was in town for concerts by Andrew, our friend Eliza Kinney (both of whom asked me to write solos for their recitals that month), and a concert where Tara and I played Donald Miller Piece with the NEC Wind Ensemble. On Marathon Monday (a day before the Wind Ensemble performance) we were in a coffee shop next to the school. Around 2:30, I received a phone call from my father who told me that there had been explosions in Copley Square. We walked outside to see Huntington Ave full of EMS crews speeding towards Copley. When we made our way into the Jordan Hall building, we watched live coverage of the scene, and were made aware that public transportation would cease operation for several hours, and that NEC would close up at 6 pm that day.

The only business that remained open was a dive bar off of Huntington ave, so we took shelter there for several hours, drinking more than we should have, until the subway began to run around 9 or so. The next day, NEC re-opened and the concert went on as planned, with a sort of somber tone. It didn’t occur to me until much later, but now I’m realizing the importance being there with those people at that time. Had I been up in VT, my experience around the bombing could have been far more confounding or painful.   

This and more recent experiences are consistent reminders that Full Circle Time Machine was (and still is) some sort of connective tissue for me. We would go on to play one more concert in Jordan Hall in the next year, and Tara played the solo violin part when we brought Voyage to Pittsburgh in 2014.

With our friend Lou Goldford on Laptop in Bloomington, IN

Since Tara moved to Bloomington, IN for another bout of grad school, we’ve kept in touch, and managed to put together a 5-concert tour last spring (from Chicago to Pittsburgh). We organized it during a rough moment in my personal life, and after the last gig, Tara had to drive back to Bloomington (and I got on a bus to Boston). There’s something to be said for spending five days in the presence of people you have a genuine connection with after so much time away. I really hadn't felt that in tune with someone in a long time, and that we couldn’t continue our run for any time in the foreseeable future had an impact on me that I wasn’t prepared for. After we said goodbye, I spent the time before my departure in the Amtrak parking lot crying. In recounting the experience with another friend a few days later, I still couldn’t get into it without tearing up. Now I live in Pittsburgh, and a year after that experience, thinking about it still has the capability to make me emotional.

We'd been trying to figure out a way to play again for the last several months, and it finally happened here in Pittsburgh at the tail end of my break. Our original plan was for the end of March, but Andrew had an audition for the symphony here a few weeks earlier, so both of them were in Pittsburgh for two days en route to Miami. In anticipation of playing again, I bought a new chord organ,and we were able to do two shows. I'm completely thrilled with what we did given such short time. We got our original sound back, and like last year we both brought some new things to the table. We were amplified at our second show, and during one improvisation there was a prolonged moment where we each had two or three sustained activities going on (vocally and instrumentally). It was wild. 

Tara is relocating to Miami after May, and we're going to try to play a few things and do some recording before she leaves the midwest. My teacher suggested that we have a number of good quality recordings so we can apply for grants and residencies. Whatever happens, I'm confident that the relative security of our current situations will allow us to invest time and effort to assure that Full Circle Time Machine keeps growing.

Photos from Pittsburgh, March 2016. At Howler's, and Station P with Anna Azizzy & Eric Weidenhof