ADAM STAFFORD: Fire Behind The Curtain

​The latest track from the forthcoming album Fire Behind the Curtain, named from a self-help relaxation CD that instructs the listener to seek “comfortable surroundings with zero disruption.”

Adam Stafford elaborates:

“It is my attempt at putting the influence of Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint to bed. It was devised as an exercise in playing between the notes and layering jerky guitar figures in a staccato style. The voices are meant to sound like alarms going off, and the track as a whole is based on panic and auditory hallucinations.

In Adam Stafford’s world nothing is smoothed over, but thrown together in the spirit of industry; like real art that builds ecstasy out of torrential anxiety. Real art, which only sets four corners or a metronome to then immediately begin fussing at its edges, testing its mise en scène for weak spots, permeations, hard borders that might belie soft openings.

​Guitar riffs stacked on top of each other, layers of strings, layers of wordless vocals, each new overdub testing how high this tower will reach before it all comes toppling down, and perhaps that’s the point. Perhaps we should start building things from scratch again.