sketches by wildercat

I have the very good habit of saving the artwork of my friends.

These are rough, unfinished compositions that invite the listener into an exploratory process. They represent springboards for further ideas, hastily recorded in mono on a smartphone humbly placed on top of a piano or keyboard or run through a looping app with which the artist was experimenting. They all represent seeds of potential while being beautiful to listen to in their own right.

I lived in Hawaii for a time with the pianist, artist, engineer and volleyball player here called wildercat. My favorite thing about being on the island was not the delicious and abundant fruit, the champagne ponds, the millennia-old lava tubes, or the warm white sands under benevolent sun and rain—it was the shining moments in the main house's huge living room when wilder came to sit down at the piano and improvised some kind of aural meditation into the night air, against the backdrop of crickets, coquí frogs, and distant ocean surf.

Magic. It was so compelling, so rare and special, sometimes if I heard the piano resounding out onto the lawn and down the hill, I would run across the property in hopes of making it to the house before he finished. (But then I feared disrupting the song by bursting in, sweaty and out of breath, so I would lie down on the grass outside under the stars and let the music carry me away.)

wildercat is a trained pianist with a good deal of music education behind him, and he also has an absurdly keen analytical mind, matched with an artist's intuition for what feels right. He has that ability of all great artists to allow art to carry him along to whatever seems inevitable and fitting. As you can hear on this album, he doesn't get in the way.

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06 April 2014: D+Am7+Bflat9
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I cannot tell you how excited I was to be able to hear his music while away from him. He uploaded it to SoundCloud and I was in the beginning years of starting my first business—with hours every day spent alone in my room working at my laptop, having no money and few friends, I took every opportunity to soak this in, and eventually racked up every single one of the hundreds of listens his original upload has.

Because this was recorded on a Sunday afternoon, one of the quietest times at the group house in Hawaii, I'd bet he'd had a good meditation with his family and felt relaxed and finally confident enough to sit, record, and share. He explores a simple melody while the sounds of his friends cleaning up in the kitchen occasionally adorn the background. (Once those were considered an annoying intrusion, but now that house is gone. Some of the people who once lived there are too. I'm glad to have a memory of it, and of them. They're as much a part of the music as the notes themselves.)

This is wilder at his most contemplative, with deep undertones leading the way to an energetic finale. The only blemish is a premature fadeout that breaks my heart a little each time—but he was 19! We were still figuring this out. The whole thing is a great piece.


13 April 2014: Nines
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Only seven days later, there might have been a brief idea here to do this on a weekly basis. It feels like an extension of the same musical mood as the previous piece—exceptionally contemplative and present, allowing each note to breathe out wherever it wants to go next.


27 March 2015: Guitar
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Like many with natural musical affinities, wilder is also really good with a guitar. This was one experiment of several with looping software—he played a riff or a phrase, then looped it in tandem with other samples he made, and sent it over to me. I love this stuff. I like the percussion, the tonality, and the triumphant sound of the rising third act. It's a solid work.


31 March 2016: self-titled
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This was a gift to me. I'd been listening to the score of Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice on repeat, and loved Zimmer's new motif for Batman, called "A Beautiful Lie." A simple, descending piano phrase, I texted wilder about loving it and just a couple hours later, he sent me back his own rendition which became my favorite, seams from the editing app he used notwithstanding.


15 March 2017: TiMOthy
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In the background, you can hear the coquí frogs adding their own contribution, making this very authentically a night-time composition recorded on the Big Island.

This piece is probably my favorite on the entire album. It's so original to the style and sensibilities of wilder and his dad (also an improvisational pianist); so lyrical, so romantic and wistful. It articulates so much yearning and catharsis all in one. It's wilder at his very best; I've listened to it over a thousand times.


04 April 2017: Gud 4
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This is a sprawling epic, using multiple different looped phrases in tandem and concluding a joyful piano denouement. It's without a doubt the biggest composition here; he had a lot of ideas going on with this one. I'd love to hear these make it into a polished, DAW-made version one day.


05 June 2018: New
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A late-evening foray into figuring out the phrasing behind Ludovico Einaudi's "Primavera," while spinning it out into something original and new. I think wilder was visiting home at the time. You get to hear him talking to himself a little as he searches around for the chords and notes he wants to hear. This is a living, auditory sketch, and it's exactly the kind of thing those close to him would get to hear him work on in those magical nights when we'd take a seat and listen to him mine the ether and pull notes out of the sky.

I live for the moment at 3:14, when he really comes into his own with it and commits.


05 June 2018: New Recording 4
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Ha! This one is based on a bunch of chiptune stuff wilder was exploring at the time. He was reproducing some of his favorite tunes from Toby Fox's brilliant "Undertale" soundtrack in some tracker or Logic Pro or something, and then created a really fun 8-bit main menu-style track, and THEN interpreted it on piano. I included only the latter-most iteration here. More of his self-talk/exploration can be heard, as well as the background characters of home.


20 August 2018: C Ab A
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I think this one was recorded in Kentucky; it's obviously a very different piano, and it sounds like the one at his aunt's house near Lexington. He and I performed on that one too.

This composition was an improv exercise in playing with the classic James Bond theme chord progression. He goes some wild places with it, finally just letting loose into total abandon at the end. You can hear the talent and endless mine of creativity the pianist is capable of shining through the blinds.


23 July 2019: Laurelwood '19
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wilder and I once lived and worked together in a place called Laurelwood. At Laurelwood, there was a building called "Expansion." Within it rested a piano. wilder sees us out with a beautiful, exploratory finale to a sketchbook full of ideas by returning to something similar to where we started, but now bigger, fuller, more confident—meditative, present, assertive, articulate, brilliant, and warm. All the best things about wildercat as a man and as an artist in one final composition.

Thank you for joining us.

A bonus:

29 March 2015: Will the Circle Be Unbroken
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When I was living in Hawaii, wilder and his family invited me to participate in a musical festival/presentation/concert and asked me to choose a song to perform. I'd been really impressed with Courtnee Draper and Troy Baker's rendition of the classic hymn "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" as heard in Irrational's Bioshock Infinite; it was easy to sing and sat nicely within my range, so somehow we landed on that. wilder recorded us performing it one night, and gave the recording to me as a gift. I'm pretty flat throughout the first half, but I think it improves come the second. I teetered a lot about including it on this album, but it seems right, and like a good closer.

Collected + presented = Curated.