Slow Days, Fast Company

Slow Days, Fast Company is an evocation in sound of the spare Californian writing style of frenemies Eve Babitz and Joan Didion, both favorites of my girlfriend Debbie, for whom this piece was written. The music is more austere, linear, and less busily polyphonic than much of my recent work, with the two similar-but-different movements cycling through gradually shifting permutations of the same stripped-out musical material. Like the endless summer days redolent of Southern California in the 1970s, this works specifically points to the novels Slow Days, Fast Company and Play It As It Lays as its inspirations, its hard concrete exterior concealing intense feeling under a highly polished, precision-machined construction that’s “only superficial on the surface.”