A Look Forward to 2025
New projects (and some looking back, too)
2024 was a sad and profound year. In August, my mom Marilyn died at the age of 87. You can read her obituary here. She led a beautiful life, divided between family, volunteering, and religious devotion, with a strong contemplative practice. She had Parkinson’s and dementia, and I am thankful that my sister Lisa was able to take her into her home. It was difficult to witness both my mom’s dementia and the slow transition of death, and even more difficult to let her go. Even now, I still catch myself trying to give her a call to check in. I am glad I got to be there, to be a part of the process. Now, I have the strange sensation of being unmoored, carrying the past around with me even as I work to find the ground beneath my feet.
So, this is why I am choosing to look forward to 2025, to focus on new challenges and projects. Each is an opportunity to find that ground, and also to be open and curious about how it will unfold.
Perhaps the most exciting personal thing to happen in 2025 will be the release of my first book. Called Noisy Memory: Recording Sound, Performing Archives, it will be published in the fall with the University of North Carolina Press. There will be a lot of writing and music shared here on Substack around the book, but for now I’ll say it is something I’ve been dreaming about for many years. It brings together ethnographic storytelling, memoir, and close listening to dozens of archival recordings. It is organized around the places and archives I’ve visited over the past two decades (from Berea, Kentucky, to Chicago, to Appalachian Ohio), and seven albums that came out of these experiences. I’ll also be making a podcast, highlighting the book’s themes and recordings. Look for more information in the upcoming months here at Sound Is Magic.
As for music, there are several new projects beginning to take shape. One that I’ve been thinking about for several years is called “The Surveyor.” It is a sonic portrait of my ancestor, Thomas Spare, who was an architect and county surveyor in Appalachian Ohio in the 1850s and 60s. Using his leather-bound notebooks, I have been driving around Perry County, retracing the exact steps he took to experience the places he visited, grasping to understand some of the many stories and contexts they suggest. I’ve also been visiting the buildings he designed and constructed, including the churches that still stand today. The project will draw from the music Spare may have heard—church hymns and Civil War songs—alongside field recordings, string quartet, and piano. It will also feature video of each location, which pays attention to landscape and to the people who live there today.
Two smaller projects are also underway: first, a commission from the Greater Columbus Community Orchestra and the Johnstone Fund for New Music for brass ensemble. This will take place on April 6. I am so looking forward to working with these musicians, who are playing each concert because they love to be there, and be a part of the ensemble.
And then there is a second project called “The House,” a personal meditation on the home in Westerville, Ohio, where I grew up. Way back in January of this year, only a few weeks before we sold our parents’ house, I brought my field recorder over to listen to its empty rooms. Everything was gone, save for a few kitchen items, the last batch of my father’s well-used tools, and our 1960s Story & Clark spinet piano. The piano’s aged hammers were hard as rocks, and the keys exceptionally light and loose and noisy, but it miraculously kept its tune (mostly). I recorded it, and its sound echoed and boomed throughout the empty house. I then traveled from room to room, recording down the hallway, around the basement, and in and out of the front and back doors. I captured the sounds my sisters and I knew so well: creaking wooden floors, the ping and drone of a fluorescent light turning on, the clacking of wooden shutters, and the sliding and bang of closet doors. Now, I’ve added a string quartet into the mix (we are recording parts now), and I’m excited to see where this collage of personal sounds might lead (it could still fail! But that would be okay, too).
Then, in the first week of March of 2025, I’ll be traveling down to North Carolina for a residency at Appalachian State, as part of the Many Musics of America series through the American Musicological Society. I was supposed to be there this past October, but the devastating flooding of Hurricane Helene made that trip impossible. I am so looking forward to being there, and am excited to see the recovery and resilience taking place there.
This past fall, I’ve also been working on a sound and video installation, called “This Was Once a Forest, This Was Once a Sea.” Commissioned by the Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati and MOCA Cleveland for a group show called Ohio Now: State of Nature, it features recordings and images from an old growth forest and an ancient sea bed, both in Ohio. Together, these places and their histories are a natural archive, and offer new ways of understanding Ohio’s landscape. For those of you nearby, the exhibit will open in Cincinnati in May of 2025, and in Cleveland in January of 2026. It has been so much fun to drive around with my pal Kevin Davison to record and film in these locations. I felt like a kid, playing in rocky beds of fossils and in the woods.
So, I suppose this means I should get to work! I hope you also have some way of making something new, or some form of work that is meaningful and important to you.
Lastly, there were many things in 2024 I am grateful for. Here are just a few:
In January, I released an EP called “The Workbench,” a sonic portrait of my dad, Paul. You can watch it in full here, and read the critical responses to it here. I feel so happy that I was able to share this project with my mom while she was still with us, too.
I was a guest on the RIYL Podcast, and I enjoyed fielding questions about “The Workbench” and earlier projects as well.
This summer, I received a Greater Columbus Arts Council Artist Project Grant, which will help fund “The Surveyor.” What an amazing gift—thanks, GCAC!
I also purchased a new (used) piano this summer (a Yamaha U3 upright). This was the first time I have ever done so! (I’ve played a string of amazing pianos over the years, from a beat-up blonde school upright to a beautifully restored 1930s Steinway grand, each with a great story; but they’ve also been gifts or loans.) I’m excited to record this piano for upcoming albums.
Here are two books I am reading, and I seem to be the exact target audience for both. I love how these authors write about sound, integrating it into their stories:
Orfeo, by Richard Powers. It is as if Powers reached into my own memories of struggling to become a composer, and the creative process. It is also full of references to music I have listened to throughout my life.
Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli. Here, Luiselli references all manner of sound studies books and scholars, in addition to a compelling larger story.
A film I loved: Family White Elephants, by the visual artist Mary Jo Bole. I’ve known MJ for many years, and this film captures both her humor and the artistry of her work, alongside a fascinating portrait of her family. She also beautifully tells the story of her mother, who died of dementia. Somehow, this is a film that shares MJ’s creative process without losing its mystery. It also shows the burden of a family archive, and how it can be both deeply meaningful and a heavy weight.
And lastly, I wanted to share that the Tecumseh Theater in Shawnee, Ohio, had a groundbreaking in March for its refurbishment into a functioning theater. I could not be more excited. This theater looms large in my mind: it is the place where my grandfather Mordecai played both music and basketball in the 1920s, and where I returned to perform in 2016 with my own band. As a board member for the non-profit that owns the theater, Sunday Creek Associates, I had the pleasure of addressing the gathered crowd of community members, business owners, government officials, construction workers, and politicians, to tell them just how important of a building the theater is, as well as the town of Shawnee. You can read an article about the event here. Here is what I had to say: “The theater is at the heart of Shawnee, between nature and history. And indeed, it has been called the ‘Soul of the Little Cities.’ I think these descriptions are apt. It seems to me this theater is important to every single person here. It is essential to our imagination about this place, about Ohio, and about Appalachia more broadly.”
I hope you all have a restful end of the year, and a happy new year —
Brian