David Shea

I

DRM4259

September 4, 2026

Digital

A note from David

As the title suggests, this album was very personal and a turning point in my life and work. Originally released in 1993 by Sub Rosa, it was the first genuine release on the Belgian label of which I would release 8 others and live concerts until 2006. This second official release, re-issued here, came with a full set of dramas and histories.

Having lived in New York since early 85 after a dramatic and difficult year at the Oberlin Conservatory – I found myself struggling to survive in the East Village and moving away from the classical training of the past years, to fully embrace free improvisation and the Downtown New Music scenes.

I very luckily met and worked with some of the greatest musicians and people I have known, and was working in the ensembles of John Zorn as early as 87, around the community of Downtown New York. A community that Zorn and so many others had built and shared with poets, dancers, filmmakers and artists. Thanks to Shelley Hirsch, Jim Staley and David Wienstien I was given my first genuine paying job taking tickets at Roulette, Jim Staley’s home and Loft Performance space, and a now legendary institution supporting New York music and the diaspora of styles and people. This place allowed me to see and absorb incredible performances almost every night throughout 85-87 and be the young kid admiring that late 70’s and early 80s scenes still rarely written about and explored historically.

Although I began making solo vocal performance pieces, at the Amica Bunker on 9th st between 1st and Ave. A and improv spaces around NY, I quickly began making tape and record collages, being influenced so heavily as a teenager by Musique Concrète and Luc Ferrari’s work.

Through the kindness and support and encouragement of Tom Cora, Fred Frith, Christian Marclay, Zeena Parkins, Chri Cochran, Shelly Hirsch, Jim Staley, David Weinstien and many others, and of course the endless kicks in the backside by John Zorn to respect yourself and just make the work and pay your dues no matter what, I persisted. The nightly performances, encouragement (and minimalist lessons) at the Experimental Intermedia Foundation – the loft space in Chinatown – and conversations with one of the kindest and most inspirational figures in my life, Phil Niblock, was another lasting influence. As were the conversations with John Cage and others of that generation and the selfless respect they had for me and our generation, created a focus of wanting to really understand their innovations and work, and make tributes and explorations of it. This became a central part of my work incorporating what I could absorb, share and continue to evolve.

As my work shifted to solo turntable work, influenced mainly by Christian Marclay and Zorn’s compositions of that period – Cobra, Spillane, Godard and many others – I had an interest in really composing with turntables and developing physical techniques in improvisation with the material on the records and tapes. Christian had pioneered vinyl as a visual/acoustic object and sound source, but my interest was mainly as a classical contemporary composer and electronic collage artist as much as I loved, and still do, his work.

As Christian began to focus on his visual work more I began working in Zorn’s ensembles more often, as the electronics and turntable player and working alongside a community of which I will write about elsewhere, as it would fill many pages to revisit that time and the friends and musicians who have shaped everything I have done since.

As the 90’s began I was fully dedicated to Zorn’s work and was involved in projects that still perhaps (with my bias I’m sure) are among his strongest works. Elegy, in particular, had pushed my turntable work farther than my solo work could have, and is a work as strong today as 30 years ago.

Just the year before, Avant Records (later Tzadik) began and Zorn started the first releases of the community of intensity that was Downtown NY. Zorn released my first CD recording Shock Corridor and I combined my work to that point with a superstar ensemble of that downtown mix of players, based on the great Sam Fuller film of the same name. It was just two years earlier, I had begun touring extensively with Zorn and with my own solo performances.

The second release on the now Tzadik label – had been planned as a tribute and full 17-part series based on The Prisoner – the incredible Partrick McGoohan ITV Series from the 60’s which had been such a huge influence as a child and teenager. It proved overly ambitious as I’m sure I was and Zorn started releasing many more of the whole range of diverse amazing work from New York and in his wide community on Tzadik which continues to this day alongside his mind spinning prolific output.

But fate had an odd turn in store for me (as fate does!) and I met at the Knitting Factory in 92 a man named Philippe Franck who talked about a new label in Brussels called Sub Rosa and that the Prisoner recording might be of interest. What followed was a 35-year friendship and a connection to Sub Rosa that lasts to this day.

The first tour after the release of Prisoner saw my move to samplers and full collage digital work as an extension of the turntable work. Multiple conversations with Derek Bailey, Steve Beresford, Tony Oxley and Reggie Workman had encouraged me to start making my own ensemble works and to find a connection to all the influences by combining the collage with the uniqueness of live performance and electroacoustic ensemble performance.

So, this set of influences and nomadic NY life all led to my solo work and new sampler work resulting in my first solo record project.

A spiritual practice had always played a central role in my life, through Buddhist and Taoist teachings and meditation practice since I was a early teenager, and I wanted to bring in a more direct connection to these ideas in my electronic music.

At the time I was reading a great deal, and in that year Krishnamurti had become a large inspiration for my introspection into life and how to navigate life as a composer and performer. The teachings around the nature of the Self or Non-Self – that we are highly conditioned by our past and media/education/cultural shaping our inner mind – was very resonant with me immediately. Here I was making music with the sources that were made by others, at another time, for another reason and context and making my music from the finds and travels through the past. Gilles Deleuze and his writings also pushed me to think in terms of reference and to weave together a relationship of re-reading or listening to existing work knowing that you are changed by it and your engagement with it changes the source and the shared experience.

The purpose was to make a record where I would not create a single sound that was not found, known, or referencing a visual, cinematic, literary or historical connection. It was Krishnamurti’s vision of the I as a collective from the beginning, even before birth and our inquiring into it deeply to understand life and ourselves that formed the basis of this record.

On a practical level, the sense that the sampler really was a folk instrument for those of us who had grown up immersed in media culture and a medium to explore these conditioned connections that formed the orchestration and compositional approach. This later led to collaborations with folk musicians throughout Asia, Ireland and the Italy /Mediterranean – my genetic American roots in Sicily and Ireland, and my spiritual ones in Buddhism.

So, all this became my first fully sampled Album and the opening to the Sub Rosa world of Fred Walheer , Guy-Marc Hinant and the tireless work of Philippe Franck.

Ironically, this ambition was again beyond my means with the technology I had at the time and my desire to create connective new music, composed from samplers and played physically. A twist was in store though as Philippe had organized a tour of a diverse group of newly signed musicians and groups, from Erich Sleichim’ Blindman Sax Quartet – to Beat Poet Ira Cohen and a cast of characters. A story for another day. But how it concerns this record is a story in and of itself.

After a performance in Brussels my Ensoniq 16+ sampling keyboard, my only instrument, was stolen off the stage, the thieves had just posed as techies and walked away with it, and on the first day of the tour. I was shattered and certainly could not afford another one. And of course, with no forced entry insurance was no guarantee there could be insurance money from the venue. Only through the infinite compassion of the director of the Beursschouburg at the time, Dirk Seghers, was I able to get another. And that is the instrument you hear on this record – and in fact he got enough insurance money to get a fully upgraded Ensoniq ASR 10 with which I wrote every composition on this album within a month thanks to all the expanded possibilities.

The record could not have existed without Dirk and he is still a friend and fondly remembered. That sampler on the other hand was on tour with me for the next 20 years and is sitting next to me now in my studio on the other side of the world in Melbourne Australia.

For you tech nostalgic types – The ASR10 was the only sampler that you could load new material and play at the same time, and it shaped my loop-based techniques as the maximum amount at any one time was16 megabytes. Limitations can yield new ideas, and this record was the first deep dive which combined all the solo turntable and sampler work up to that point and of course relied on Zorn’s influence and help (and record collection inspiration) but I had formed a direction of layering different styles in loops and phase shifts more that the fast cutting technique he had made so uniquely his own,

So here was my sense of I, myself as a collective of the past, but with my compositional voice playing a connective role, collaborating, conversing, with the past and trying to give respect to those composers and musicians I had studied and followed so closely. Each piece was a bow to all the influences I have mentioned here so far and listening and watching everything I could find.

Here I will go through the pieces and end this story as I really never revisited this era in recordings until the Art of Memory one of my last Sub Rosa Records since re-released on Room 40.

Film: was the solo work performed and recorded live in one take with the ASR 10 with all samples coming from records, tapes, traditional musics from my collection of Folkways and Smithsonian collections of folk music, sfx records and anything else that I had collected and been able to keep.

Screwy Squirrel: Was a nod to the great Text Avery and his cartoons and the composer Scott Bradley and his sound design crew at MGM. These are collections sound designer friends gave me over the years and my perennial encore piece at most solo concerts.

Trio for Samplers: Was written for a trio originally before I had the ASR 10 and we all had to load floppy disks, but I was able to create a solo version that was directly taken from my solo turntable days. Connection upon connection an endless flow, the basis of my music at that time.

Alpha: Revisited my love of film, and montage techniques and of the work of Jean Luc Godard and here his 1964 film Alphaville. As I described it at the time is was not a soundtrack but a cinematic composition – that “existed both in, and independent from its original source”.

I used the endlessness of connections I was finding between musical traditions cultures and media sources in performance and composition and placed it in the framework of the scene structure of the original film , sampling sections of it along the way to stay close to the tribute feel I intended and wanting the original sources to be evident and unmanipulated electronically. Placed in a theatre of connections and wanting to make it clear it was a montage – not my sound source creation.

This became the basis of many works over the 90s and 2000’s – His Yu Chi, The Tower of Mirrors, The Book of Scenes, Collaborations with Robin Rimbaud (Scanner), The Art of Memory, Satyricon, Triptych, Mort Aux Vaches, The Soundtrack Dial History and many others.

So now you have ‘most’ of the whole story, but this has been only my story, listening is what forms this record and discovering it’s sources, our collective listening and the work that the sampler made so evident in those days and now computer work extends. Now we have a generation that is fully aware of mash-ups, internet mix culture, Hip Hop and Mix Culture, appropriated montage, sampling as its own independent form and the equality of created, found, recorded material in constant interplay with deeply personal original work in relationship with plants, animals and the natural world. At the time and now I wanted to discover, share and experience these with this unique instrument and sampled ecosystem and understand the universal and the non-existent selves we are as a separate I, That it is a constant dance to be part of the whole – no real separate existence, yet all unique within it, with our set of conditioned and unconditioned lives and cultures. 

credits

released September 4, 2026

Composed By, Producer, Performer, Photography By, Liner Notes – David Shea
Engineer – Jim Dungen
Remastered by Lawrence English at Negative Space

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