"There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more
painful than the risk it took to blossom." -Anaïs Nin

The Animated Adventures of Knox
Notes on process:

Sometimes it starts with something as simple as a journal entry or a few words on a napkin.
Plot points and conflict. Some sort of emotional narrative asking to be explored. A story with a beginning, middle and end, slowly develops. Timelines slowly become abstract linear structures with events and fluctuating layers of complexity. Nightmares and memories exaggerated and brought to life.

The music comes first but I'm already thinking cinematically. Creating moods and establishing characters. I visualize color and texture for each scene. Melodies and rhythms emerge out of these feelings and moods. I carefully work through the structure of the piece. Building arcs. Tension and release. I start to hear in my head what kind of instrumentation I want and immediately think about specific players. Chad Taylor and I have been on parallel paths for over a decade. He represents the reflection of the external world in this music, grounding the others. Oscar Noriega lays out melodic gems throughout this work, so gentle and playful. He is the child in the piece, full of wonder and recklessness. Okkyung Lee's sound pulls at my heart and is always a contrast to my usually agitated mind. Here she represents love and a cautious beauty. Jean Cook is like a rock in this music, searing continually, pressing down on you, representing a shrill and doubting undercurrent. Alex Harding plays madness. I originally saw madness as cold and out of control but Alex brings a profound humanity to it and shows the struggle to not give in.

After the story is developed I create a video graphic score based on the events of the play. Each sequence is drawn out in layers visually, showing entrances, rhythms and textures. Each character is represented by a different color. The scores are covered in text notes referring to written melodies, dynamics and the emotional motivations for each character. Next they are animated so they move from left to right, slowly passing through a vertical line in the middle of the screen that shows the musicians where they are in the piece. In the studio the score is projected; timelines that pass before your eyes. This creates the cinematic quality of the music.

The Animated Adventures of Knox chronicles the development of emotional states throughout a lifetime. Your sense of love grows and changes. Your sense of guilt can grow and take over. Your
self-awareness, your sense of wonder and the sense of your place in the world, each grows and changes and can go off track. Once madness has come, it is forever a part of you. It's an internal world, an ongoing drama that controls perception. These patterns are the biggest characters in my life. The interactions of these characters define me. The dramatization of it all is just an attempt to gain some respectable level of self knowledge.

Throughout the rehearsal and recording process I have personal conversations with each musician about their role in the story to give them more in depth background for their motivations. These conversations are quite intimate for me, sharing very personal experiences with them so they can understand the emotion. I try to get them to talk about similar experiences they've had to help bring those same feelings to the surface. This approach is especially effective right before the performance. It's like throwing salt on a wound to play after a conversation like that. I want to hear that struggle. With some musicians it's better to keep them in the dark, feed on their confusion. I try to limit the amount of information they have about each other's characters so they respond to behavior as naturally as possible.

The music was recorded by my good friend Geoff Mann at his studio in Redhook, Brooklyn in November of 2004. We recorded the soundtrack in one take, a very honest and immediate piece of music. The movie took another eleven months to become what it is today.

My collaboration with painter M.P. Landis goes back almost seven years. I live with his paintings in my home and he has often painted live while I've performed. Where I become rigid in my work, he's flexible; so the compromise is always a learning experience. Filmmaker Michael Sanzone's aesthetic sense grounds this work. His enthusiasm for experimentation made it possible for us to follow our imaginations in the original conceptions of the images. We shot for three days in New York City. Michael, M.P. and cinematographer Davin Reich shot a total of seven hours of footage.

The editing process for me was a very lonely one, not only in the solitude but also the subject matter. Perhaps this is the nature of self-portraits. Being in a state of isolated confrontation with your self for an extended period of time is exhausting. In the end the expression of this internal world has given me freedom from it. I can hold it my hand and I can share it with you. And that's really the moral of the story. After delving as deeply as I possibly could inward, the real pay off is sharing these ideas with others. Starting a conversation. It's clear to me now that the dialogue is constant. It marches on with or without us.

- TA