Jon Siddall – Little Monster Dreams
Jon Siddall
Independent (jonsiddall.com)
BC-based composer, guitarist and music producer Jon Siddall’s career has for decades bravely straddled the not-always-amicable worlds of vernacular and contemporary classical music. I first met Siddall at York University in the mid-1970s when we were both students of composers James Tenney and David Rosenboom, among others. He continued his graduate composition studies in California with Terry Riley and was introduced to gamelan degung performance by Lou Harrison. Returning to Toronto, Siddall was inspired to combine those disparate musical streams and formed Evergreen Club Gamelan in 1983.
While Siddall’s been tapping into his garage band roots in recent years with his countrified Straightup Seven Hills band, in 2020 he also released Belvedere a self-described “slow music” instrumental album. His current EP Little Monster Dreams follows in the latter experimental ambient vein with two substantial instrumentals aesthetically harkening back to his earliest minimalist compositions.
The three-part Little Monster Dreams of Floating was performed by the composer playing heavily processed guitar, bells and other percussion, including gamelan gongs. The title is a tribute to his French bulldog, the “little monster” who was particularly fond of this music. Siddall describes his musical goal as “amplifying stillness by simplifying memory … the gentle meandering of the sounds relieving the need to keep track of time.”
The other work, With the Tides, consists of a dense chord slowly disintegrating over its duration, separated by silences of varying length. In additional to tidal cycles, the work also explores “what the Japanese call ‘ma’: the space in between things.” This sumptuous-sounding, formally terse, track was constructed solely using multi tracked blown bottles.
Perceived form here is elusive, subverted, never quite materialising – a concern which “ultimately becomes unimportant” says the composer since, “we’re just with the sound. Is it music for meditation? Can be.”
