A1. Skeleton Key
A2. Volcano Diving
A3. Remote Viewing
A4. Yesterday Island
B1. Future
B2. Particle Ballet
B3. Crystals
B4. Even As We Speak

The American percussionist, composer, and songwriter David Van Tieghem (b. 1955) is something like a musical equivalent to astronomy’s “hypothetical astronomical object”: while evidence of an irresistible gravitational pull can be felt in deep reaches of the cosmos, its source is enshrouded in darkness, revealing glimpses of celestial power to astute observers. For David Van Tieghem, these observers include a dizzyingly impressive cast of landmark musicians with whom he has composed and performed. David Byrne, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Arthur Russell, Laurie Anderson, Steve Reich, Robert Fripp, Brian Eno, Debbie Harry are just a few from an exhaustive (and ongoing) list. He has also composed music for Pulitzer and Tony-winning dance and theatre, for productions starring Adam Driver, Christopher Walken, Molly Ringwald, Bradley Cooper, Keith Carradine, Orlando Bloom, among others. And he has even appeared, with toy raygun and kitchen utensils, on David Letterman and, in NASA labcoat and Egon Spengler glasses, in performance at the Guggenheim for German national television. And yet, his trio of (staggeringly beautiful, utterly unique) solo albums released from 1984-1989 remain out of print - the mysterious force behind a highly influential orbit. The above achievements notwithstanding, David Van Tieghem will likely be a discovery for a lot of listeners.

The music of new collection Even As We Speak began in a hotel room in Tokyo in the mid-80’s. Van Tieghem was at the time mid-tour with Ryuichi Sakamoto, newly flying solo and buoyed by a rush of YMO popularity. Alone in his hotel room, Van Tieghem asked Sakamoto’s tour crew if he would be permitted to borrow some equipment from the stage show - specifically, the Fairlight CMI, a $40,000 audio workstation comprised of three hefty machine parts as big as filing cabinets capable of producing some of the most powerful synthesis of the day. The request was granted, and Van Tieghem began composing music between Sakamoto concerts, saving his progress to 8” floppy discs that could be transported back home to New York and his rental space in the city’s legendary Battery Sound studio.

“I had too many ideas,” he says of this period. While much of his day-to-day work as a coveted drummer and percussionist for hire paired him with innumerable musicians of generational regard, his own compositional instincts had become too noisy to ignore. He began booking overnight slots at Battery Sound alongside friends and collaborators Arthur Russell and Peter Gordon. There, they tapped into a mesmerising middle ground between Van Tieghem’s love of early MIDI programming, playfully out-there percussion, and cultured, refined songwriting. The results were albums These Things Happen (1984), Safety in Numbers (1987), and Strange Cargo (1989). The first of these was - surprisingly, in hindsight - released by Warner Brothers, clearly with ambitions for commercial success in a musical landscape learning to appreciate the palatable weirdness of acts such as The Talking Heads, Devo, Oingo Boingo et. al. The relationship did not last. Eventually, a call from the NYC A&R scout of the label Private Music, headed by Tangerine Dream’s Peter Baumann, led to the release of the latter albums. The label favoured “digitally recorded” music, meaning Van Tieghem and his collaborators had to rent a 32-track digital workstation to capture the hardware programming and MIDI sequencing of his compositions.

By the late 80’s, Van Tieghem had reached a roughly halfway split between freelance performance and composition and his own solo works. He remembers working and recording a lot at home, on his Tascam 4-track and a revolving succession of rented gear, as well as utilising NY’s scarcely believable Public Access Synthesizer Studio (run in part by Bob Moog, and by then housing a Fairlight, a Roland Super Jupiter, an E-mu Emulator II, a Yamaha TX816 rack, Apple IIe and Macintosh computers, an Otari eight-track recorder, and the services of a staff engineer). “Volcano Diving”, a key track, was created after having left the bands of Laurie Anderson and David Byrne, but with the lingering influence of their patterned, expressive vocal styles still in his mind alongside a studious adoration for Indonesian gamelan rhythms. Appropriately, early or alternate versions of several of the pieces here were conceived as soundtrack works, bisecting Van Tieghem’s day and night jobs. “Remote Viewing” was part of a score for acclaimed choreographer Twyla Tharp’s 1983 production Fair Accompli; “Crystals” was written for the MacArthur Genius Grant-winning juggler Michael Moschen, then best known for his work on the movie Labyrinth.

David Van Tieghem was born in 1955 in Washington, D.C., the son of two visual artists. He studied percussion with Justin DiCioccio and at Manhattan School of Music, and, in 2007, he was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for Music Composition. The stories he tells of these songs and the peers and personnel riding in their waves, so eyecatchingly extraordinary to the everyday listener, are commonplace to him. And it is in this skyhigh stratum that we begin to understand his work - it is luminous, remarkable, and just as gravitationally immense as a distant star that continues to shine, brightly as ever.