Jordan Dykstra - The Arrow of Time (2020)

"We want to fabricate a new music. We imagine a situation in which the sounding together of tones is never taken for granted, is continually renewed and reinvented. We know that the effect of any set of simultaneous tones, by means of the multiplication implicit in the harmonic series, totals much more than the number of notes played. A room can be made to vibrate with hundreds of frequencies by a single chord. We want to enter into a universe of harmony in which it becomes possible to hear into the interstices of what does not sound by means of what does sound. We will use harmony to probe one world, and when that world is known, move from it to another and another beyond that.

It is with this state of mind that I listen to the music by Jordan Dykstra. It reawakens in me a primal fascination with the simultaneity of sound. Because of the inventiveness of its compositional strategies, the music inspires a sense of open possibility, of something yet to come, of something yet not quite with us. Dykstra has a creative impulse, shared with many experimental composers, of not wanting to repeat in one piece what he has done in another. Each work seems to begin with a moment in an empty space. When I listen carefully before each piece on this disc starts, I have a keen sense of that space. It must contain an echo of the moment just before Dykstra started writing the piece: that moment when anything can happen."

— Michael Pisaro-Liu, from the liner notes to "The Arrow of Time"

Jordan Dykstra (b. 1985, Sioux City, Iowa) is a Brooklyn-based violist and composer exploring the performer-composer-listener relationship through the incorporation of conceptual, graphic, and text-based elements. In 2007 he moved to Portland, OR and became involved in the experimental music scene in the Pacific NW. Aside from performing and recording with individuals and bands — including Dirty Projectors, Valet, Atlas Sound, and A Winged Victory for the Sullen — he worked at Marriage Records and Publishing House. In 2014 he received a Career Opportunity Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission to apprentice with Daníel Bjarnason, composer and conductor of the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra, in Reykjavík, Iceland. He received his BFA in 2016 under Michael Pisaro, Ulrich Krieger, and Wolfgang von Schweinitz at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles. In 2018 he received his MA in Experimental Composition from Wesleyan University in Connecticut where — under the mentorship of Alvin Lucier and astrophysicist Seth Redfield — his thesis explored connections between microtonality and the cosmic distance ladder. In 2019 he received a Cultural Grant from the Netherlands-America Foundation to compose “The Arrow of Time” and premiere the work with Reinier van Houdt in Amsterdam. As a media composer he has numerous credits including the films "Blow the Man Down", "Hail Satan?", "It Comes At Night", and the 2019 Emmy winner for Outstanding Investigative Documentary, "Documenting Hate". His compositions for film have been heard at Cannes, Sundance, TriBeCa, TIFF, and the IFFR. His performance highlights include MOCA (CA), Harpa (Iceland), Musikfestval Bern (Switzerland), Ftarri (Tokyo), CHAFF (Brussels), Echo Bücher (Berlin), Syros Institute (Greece), Yale Union (OR), Big Ears Festival (TN), and the RISD Museum (RI). Recordings of his music (solo and collaborative) have been issued by Domino, Milan, Marriage, Mexican Summer, K, Gilgongo, and Dykstra’s own cottage industry label Editions Verde.