Ryan Alfred’s “We Are Made Of Time”

Polymath artist Ryan Alfred’s “We Are Made Of Time” is a fully improvised exercise in spontaneous composition, a tightrope act of electronic, vocal, and acoustic elements recorded and processed live without a net of pre-recorded material. Onstage are a few synthesizers, an upright bass, a nylon string guitar, and a vocal mic, routed through an Ableton Live-based processing network optimized for improvisation.

A graduate of Berklee School Of Music’s Synthesis department, Ryan has been thinking about what it means to perform electronic music since the late 90s. “I would go see performances by electronic artists, and it was nearly always somewhere on the karaoke spectrum, meaning to some degree it was pre-recorded, with some elements left for musicians onstage to play or sing. Often, it was “hit play and look busy”, where it was clear that most if not all of what was heard was pre-recorded. It really got me thinking, what exactly do we mean when we say somebody was playing live ?”

Maybe time and refinement are all that really distinguish composition from improvisation, but not all edits are improvements, and often the initial expression of an idea is the truest to it’s essence. We have essays and we have conversations; “We Are Made Of Time” brings Ryan Alfred’s full range of instruments into conversation, employing modern technology and timeless instruments to present a unique, fully present moment of creation.