Artist description Mike Swinchoski is a Boston-based composer, musician and music theorist. Tomorrow is a step beyond experimental music for its own sake. It is the first step in Mike's goal of providing context to experiments in order to develope and define a new musical language.

Music Style Experimental

Musical Influences DAN JACKSON - this guy shares my musical roots. He has an amazing set of ears.

Artist History Here is a little background about my compositions and me. I am including this rough, surface outline here so that it might provide some insight into how the music came about. If you have any questions or want any further information from reading this, you are invited to send any comments or any other feedback you have by writing in the guestbook or emailing me directly at mswin@gis.net. There are two dimensions of music that that stimulated my initial interest; chord changes and musical experimentation. Like many people, I get a real emotional rush from hearing chords that express how I feel – it’s a real bonus if the chords are a surprise to what I expected to hear. I really started listening for this payoff while discovering country blues, blues rock and R&B. I remember hearing songs by Josh White and the Keif Hartley Blues Band, and BB King that left an impression on me. I also listened to a lot of soul tunes, the Spinners, Delphonics O’Jays just to name a few. I was also lucky enough to be hitting adolescence and getting interested in Rock music at a time when it was experiencing a brief period of unselfconscious experimentation. This took place in the late 1960’s to early 1970’s. While tuning up and down the radio dial, I stumbled onto some of the bands that played acid rock and the more progressive rockers of that time period (King Crimson, Hendrix, Brian Auger’s Oblivion Express, Cream, Todd Rundgren’s Utopia, and many others). These bands were doing a lot of inventive things with arrangement, combining styles and using more complex harmonies and rythmns than I was accustomed to hearing. They had a vision, and that inspired me to begin work on a musical vision of my own. I started learning to play acoustic guitar and began making up songs. I was also stretching my imagination, trying to think up ideas like the bands I listened to. I made up a name for my imaginary band “Synthesis”. When I was 16 I heard John Coltrane playing a coda at the end of “I only want to talk about you”. It was abstract, but it made sense. That had a major impact on me. Now I was starting to understand “modern” Jazz. Put these events together and you have some of the major moments of my formative years as a composer.. I had a rocky adolescence. I was really skinny and had a bad case of acne, and I was pretty much a nerd in high school, but music, with it’s innovative and abstract aspects to stimulate my mind and the emotional support provided by the good chords helped me get through those hard times. It also helped me build a more positive self-image by the time I reached college. (see influences to find out who more of my musical saviors are). I took a music theory class my freshman year but dropped out a couple of weeks into because the gap between what I was hearing in my mind and the beginner Theory book was too wide. All my musical education had come from being a music listener and learning the guitar on my own. I had taken a few guitar lessons, but had a problem with learning to read music because it didn’t seem to accommodate a lot of tunings that I could perceive. With music as a major not a viable option for me, I studied psychology. I chose this field because of the balance of liberal arts and sciences it provided. Also, having been raised a Catholic, I felt obligated to help people transcend their environment. Clinical psychology seemed like a logical career choice. During my time in school I was exposed to many truly great thinkers; Abraham Maslow, Eric Fromm, Carl Menninger, Shakespere, Noam Chomsky, tons of others. Although I never pursued a professional career in psychology, I feel it was a tremendously enriching experience. At the same time though, I still felt an intense desire to write music. Most of my friends were going into law, medicine or business however, and I felt myself increasingly drifting away from them. Although I practiced the guitar a lot, I didn’t really come into contact with a lot of musicians who were interested in the same types of music that I was. So a few months after I graduated from the University of Missouri at the end of 1980, I went to Austin Texas in search of people more on my wavelegnth. I played Jazz guitar at a small club called the Beach for a couple of years and worked part time jobs to support myself. However I spent most of my time isolated, trying to write material that had real legs. I was intimidated by the vast amount of good music out there, so I spent my time writing, trying to make better songs, and not a lot time self-promoting and networking in the music industry. In the meantime I did meet a lot of nice people whom I could relate to some degree. I met some friends (Rob Seigel and Maire Ann Diamond) while working in a grocery store who were originally from Boston. We formed a band called “Ralph’s Lunch” named after a sign they found in a basement in Cambridge MA. And I became the bass player in it. We played covers of 60’s rock and originals we wrote. We played a couple of gigs, but soon after that they decided to move back home. My cousin Don was studying conducting at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston at the time, and knowing of my interest in composition graciously invited me to come stay with him. With all roads leading east, the band moved to Boston together in the late summer of 1984. Don helped me get a job working as a security guard in the library of the Conservatory. This was an important boost to my musical development because I was able to talk to all kinds of musicians and composers. From them I learned that my more esoteric ideas about composition weren’t really as off –the-wall as I thought. With their encouraging words in mind I decided to devote my time to the more ethereal compositional ideas I had always worked on in the back of my mind. Along with talking about abstract ideas with the students and faculty of the conservatory, I was exposed to a number of the more popular modern day composers. I tried to keep my listening of these composers to a minimum, just enough to understand their rudimentary ideas. I did this because I wanted to maintain as unique a compositional voice as I could. I wanted to take advantage of the fact that I do not have a formal musical education, in order to be able to come up with ideas I couldn’t get if I were too conditioned to think in such a traditional manner. I wanted to develop my own voice. I was now quite aware that as far as experiments go, pretty much everything had been tried by somebody at some point in this Century. So rather than write things that were just experiments for their own sake, I made my goal to provide a context to some of them - maybe even eventually develop a language derived from my own experiments. I started working on this ideal by looking at different forms and structures in different styles of music and trying to find common denominators. From there I would work on providing a context for them. I did this by reading a lot of newspapers, magazines, listening to radio programs and watching television. I was looking for underlying patterns that reflected developing trends in the world around us; science, nature, political structures, and psychological states are a few of the first subjects I tied these pieces. From this work came the music on the Tomorrow album. Although the liner notes explain the essential musical ideas behind them, some of the pieces were also developed with these patterns in mind. Here are a couple of examples of what I mean. The Garden at Night – is essentially an attempt to perceive a natural scene without the anthropomorphic qualities we normally ascribe to pieces about nature. My intent was to experience the garden with no preconceptions, as if I had never seen plants or flowers before. I had nature in mind again when writing Regeneration. I was thinking of different species and how it seems to me that all the members a particular species appear to be permutations a template. The way I did this was to state main theme (the first phrase in the piece) and have the subsequent repetitions of it “generate” themselves, establishing their unique identity through subtle variations of the main theme. Looking back though, I think the form of the piece is the element that best gets this idea across. I was looking for analogies to living in America when I came up with the idea for The Key Pulse Experiments. I wanted to find a way for players to have as much freedom as possible without it disintegrating into chaos. So I chose the concepts of what key they would play in and what pulse they would play at as loose laws for them to follow. X-Rays is representative of several pieces I have come up with that attempt to isolate musical elements such as melody, rhythm, dynamics, intensity and ambiance and treat them with equal compositional weight. This idea was loosely based on the philosophical concept of deconstruction. Along with writing in the modern music medium, I still wrote jazz related material. The other important musical goal I wanted to achieve was to write material that bridged a gap between jazz and modern music. I have written this material, but haven’t yet gotten a studio recording of it. Look for it in the future on the website. During this time, I continued to play bass in “Left of Center” as the band was now called. By 1987 we were playing in most of the clubs in the area on a steady basis. I was also polishing up some songs I had started in the Austin days, and I proceeded to record them starting in May of that year. The result was an album I named “The Torch is Passed”. The songs reflected the intense social, political idealism of my earlier years. After I made the record I was out of money (so far, I have funded all my own projects). I pushed the record around town a little, and it got a nice review or two in the local Rock magazines, and a small amount of airplay for Wonder Why, but it was too far under the radar to go much further. It was however a worthwhile first step at getting the music out to the world. It was now 1990.The band broke up, as we were all heading in different musical directions. I was feeling the pressure from the “real” world to become a member. I was getting the reputation of being a “slacker” because I wasn’t racing for money like everyone else. I’m sure my sanity was questioned quite often because I had been spending so much time obsessed with thinking esoteric musical thoughts, playing in a local band and working part time jobs for low pay. There was a good side to this pressure, though. It pushed me to work as hard as I could. It also made me redefine and expand my ambitions for writing. There are many benefits to all kinds that come through the arts, and they are all important, the most being that the listener should be free to enjoy what they listen to in whatever manner they wish. However, I felt obligated to provide something more at this stage of my musical development. I adopted the belief that to make your artistic endeavors worthwhile you should take on conflicts that you find in the environment and reach a resolution to it, then translate that solution through the music you write. I sought to include this quality with the imaginative, innovative side of my pieces. This is how I reasoned to myself my music could be of more practical worth to the world. I started working full time menial job in a hospital blood lab and taking courses in computer science. It didn’t matter what my aesthetic senses were at this point, I needed to survive economically and that meant joining that mainstream that everyone loved so much. In what little time was left, I did work on refining my ideas and even managed to write a couple of songs for a friend of mine’s band. Overall though, this was a difficult time. The job was very stressful. I experienced first-hand the subtle and not-so-subtle racism and mental abuse given to immigrants, Black people and other minorities and anyone else trapped in a mcjob. I was stuck in this situation for a while because I need to finish the computer classes I had to take and also because I had no “marketable” skills hence no where to go. This provided the subject matter for the HOLD record. I wrote and recorded the songs while working in this situation over a period of 4 years. To me it worked on a lot of levels, I was writing out my gut reactions to how my ideals were now holding up in the face of hard reality , about the environment I was in, and trying to survive in those circumstance. In this sense the material also possessed the quality of facing conflicts and translating resolutions to them that added I now wanted to convey. The record also combined some of the ideas constructed during my “Conservatory period” with pop-rock material. By the end of 1994 thanks to the growing computer industry I was able to move on to a better job. I then concentrated once again on the abstract side of music. Currently I am involved in refining and completing theories and compositions in the more experimental side of the way I write. Time has provided me with the chance to develop some of the more solid ideas more fully, along with being the foundation for some newer ideas I have come up with and wish to record as soon a I can. My aim now is to explore aspects I previously didn’t have time for, and to inject emotional elements into the theoretical pieces. An additional goal is to create a musical world that looks at the area that lies between the conscious and subconscious. Lately my instincts have been leading me back to writing some more pop/rock songs again. Be sure to check this website often as further developments will be posted here.

Albums Torch is Passed, Hold, Tomorrow,Directions

Press Reviews Your CD "Tomorrow" was for me a happy aural and intellectual experience. In afew lines I don't want to "evaluate", but to simply to admit that I enjoyed yourmusic as it is: authentic, pure, condensed, austere, unornamented and genuine.Rhythm in time, rhythm in space, sound and silence, music in silence. Whispers.Congratulation! And continue to be creative in the next millennium...Eduardo Kusnir

Location Jamaica Plain, MA - USA

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