Emmy Award-winning electronic musician, composer, and sound designer
Deru (Benjamin Wynn) recorded his album
We Will Live On using a Disklavier, an acoustic piano equipped with electronic sensors in order to be digitally controlled, and custom-made sequencing software. After the pieces were painstakingly composed and recorded, Wynn re-recorded the material in an abandoned missile silo near Los Angeles, adding natural resonance and haunting reverberation. The pieces themselves are intricate and delicate, with clacking keys clearly audible, and they're programmed with a strange sort of precision that includes overlapping and imperfect notes, making it hard to tell if the music is played by a human or generated by technology. The more hypnotic, minimalist "We're Not Needed" greatly benefits from the atmospheric treatments, sounding like a walk through fallen leaves before getting swept up by the wind. "To Quiet the Voices" sounds somewhat like a music box playing a
Steve Reich composition, filled with pauses for rewinding. "The Rain" is a sequence of clipped, truncated notes that imitate rainfall, gradually developing into more fleshed-out melodies. "Incremental Loss" is a tonal outlier, with more delicately plucked notes resembling pizzicato strings rather than piano, and a much more spacious delivery than the other pieces, providing more room to get lost in one's thoughts. Many of these tracks seem to convey feelings of loneliness, losing one's way, or disappearance, and none do this more dramatically than "The Return," which clusters into a whirlwind of sound before dissipating into near silence. The song titles all point to the matter-of-fact actuality of death and the body's return to the elements, with the name of the album assuring that the cycle of life will continue. ~ Paul Simpson