These works started their lives as recordings of my piano onto an old, beat up tape using an old tape recorder.  the piano I bought on the street in brooklyn for seventy five dollars.  I was told it had been the piano in a local bar and was in quite a state of disrepair.  over the year or so that I lived in my apartment I grew quite attached to the black spinet with gold stickers spelling "steinwa" on its face.  the cassette I found while cleaning out old offices in queens.  it was among an abandoned collection of cassettes that someone left behind.  I adopted them, giving them new life by layering field recordings and piano over led zeppelin and the police which i found on them.  the tape recorder I found in a storeroom at work.  no one cared when I took it home and it always sat next to the piano with a cassette ready. one of the cassettes I ended up using had been recorded onto so many times that it became worn out and never played back my recordings the same way.  after working  with this cassette for a while i had filled it up, even recording over some of my own recordings.  at this point I started creating compositions using this material, with ?samples of various lengths looped and played against each other, yielding unexpected results. I came across the concept of graceful degradation while reading a book by richard restak. I realized that the idea fit in very well with the work I was doing.  memories are recorded in our brains and surface whenever they are triggered; but each memory is blurred through the process of recollection.  This blurring process occurs as memories are recalled and observed in the present, altering the original version. There are many references to this concept within the compositional process and final results, and perhaps more which I haven't discovered. The first layer I encountered was within the cassette. Each time I played a section of the tape the sounds were altered and placed in a new context.  The next layer was in the studio working with the sounds, sampling sections of the tape and creating the compositions. as each sample plays its part in the piece, it is altered through its relationship with the sounds of the other samples.  Another layer exists while listening, as each person develops an individual relationship with the piece, and the sounds are placed in the context of their experience

liner notes by Asher Thal-Nir