Bloom

I came to call it bloom in 2013 — a way of writing music that starts from a slow recorded original and grows through layers of new notes added across cycles. The first time I did this I played the first twenty-four notes of Bach’s D Minor Violin Allemande on piano at six seconds per note, recorded that performance, and then layered new notes through seven more passes. Each chord opens outward.

Performing those chords one note at a time, with no click track, makes simultaneous events impossible. The rhythm is dictated by the player’s breath, not by the bar.

The bloom family has since grown to include pieces for solo guitar, marimba, string trio, and orchestra. Hashflowers (2024), a generative album made with Maxwell Arkin, applies the method computationally — a hundred procedurally-generated blooms, each a deterministic flowering from a starting seed.