We Will Live On

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 theyre 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 "Were 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 ones thoughts. Many of these tracks seem to convey feelings of loneliness, losing ones 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 bodys return to the elements, with the name of the album assuring that the cycle of life will continue. ~ Paul Simpson