Prairie was composed for Art Lotto: An artist-led initiative that auctions artworks and reallocates funds to initiatives supporting artists, justice, and equitable futures.

The piece was composed to fit on one vinyl record. One side had a 20 minute version of Prairie and the other side had two versions composed in complimentary key signatures engraved on a one of a kind lathe cut-record that featured two grooves that ran parallel to each other.

This record is made to be playable at various speeds, forwards or backwards and has no definitive beginning or end. The multiple streams of audio on the two sides ensure that there is no clear way of experiencing the piece in a certain A to B manner. Furthermore, the transparent nature of the physical disc makes it difficult to tell which side is which ensuring that the listener must engage with the record and manufacture their own experience. It is recommended to sit next to your record player and move the stylus to different parts of the disc while paying close attention to your sonic environment and how Prairie interacts, distracts or compliments it.


The version uploaded to bandcamp is different than the versions cut on the lathe to ensure the vinyl version remains 1 of a kind.

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The importance of fire in human evolutionary history is generally accepted though to what extent is often disputed. For early humans fire would have provided heat, extended days and helped to deter predators but what role does it play the technological age?

Dropping the stylus on a vinyl record, one can hear the age and life of the disc. The static crackles and pops convey the journey of the record, how it’s been used and how it has moved through space. Various analogue media contain similar sonic artifacts, often leading to the use of the adjective “warm”. Records have a limited frequency range compared to the digital realm resulting in an audible bump in the mid-range - the range of the human voice. While being comforted by the relatably human frequency response of a record one can easily pin-point the undeniable similarities between the unwanted noise present on aged vinyl and the sound of fire. In fact there are elemental qualities inherent in various analogue media. The rotary nature of a lot of older audio technology often results in rhythmic swooping or swishing sounds comparable to that of a babbling brook or a stream while the varying amounts of noise built up on magnetic tape may resemble the sound of wind.

“It must be as ignorable as it is interesting” said a young Brian Eno in reference to Ambient 1: Music for Airports. Staring at a blank landscape for days on end you may start to see images in the sky - imagine the rolling hills like modulating grooves on a record - trees like spikes.

The Prairies in Canada are a temperate grassland and shrubland biome within the prairie ecoregion of Canada that consists of northern mixed grasslands in Alberta, Saskatchewan, southern Manitoba, as well as northern short grasslands in southeastern Alberta and southwestern Saskatchewan. Driving from east to west along the Trans-Canada highway, one experiences an impressively slow evolving landscape that changes from remarkably flat to rolling bumbling hills all of which feel endless and vast. While traversing this terrain by car you drift in and out of an awareness of your surroundings - exploring the mental space between admiration, reverence and total boredom. The extended long-form nature of the trip allows room to engage with the experience on different levels, fading in and out of a conscious awareness of one’s own thoughts.

John Cage described his chance-based compositions as “purposeless play” which is "an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living”.