Damon Waitkus was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1977. He studied composition as an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts with Salvatore Macchia and Charles Bestor, as a Masters student at Mills College with Annie Gosfield and Anne LeBaron, and intermittently with Brian Robison. He is currently a member of the Bay Area Composer’s Circle and plays in the band Oogog.
Anxiety
I composed and recorded “Anxiety” between January and October of 2005. It is my first earnest attempt at bringing the disparate regions of my musical language together in one piece. Much of the piece was composed by ProTools bricolage using “field” recordings I’ve collected over the past few years on minidisc, which feature everything from bees in my bathroom (a problem, yes) to pile drivers at a construction site in Providence, Rhode Island. If you’re bored, you can listen for my father sneezing, it’ll be like a treasure hunt. Most of the sections which feature “real instruments” I notated, and in a few spots I improvised. I got a lot of help from Emily Packard, who played all those violins, and a little from Dave McNally, who played cello and ARP 2600 in the improvisation which sparked the whole idea but which I subsequently buried in the mix.
The video was composed by Dan Millman, an artist and writer who lives in Easthampton, Massachusetts.
“Anxiety” is dedicated to Ian Forsythe.