Never say never. A Christmas-themed project was pushed so far off Tim Story's artistic ‘back burner’, he jokes that it was "hardly still on the stove at all." But inspiration can take strange twists. So Silent Cycles was born, simultaneously a 'Christmas album' of sorts, and Story's wry commentary on—and potential antidote to—the genre itself and the holiday season it represents. An elegaic 75-minute exploration of just one verse of the most popular Christmas song of all time, Silent Cycles was conceived as an audio installation for public spaces (it will be exhibited at the Toledo Museum of Art in 2020), and is now available from Curious Music in digital DL and physical formats.

Expanding on what he deprecatingly calls the 'smudges', a technique that has captivated him for several years, Story elegantly deconstructs 15 recorded versions of Silent Night into a singular tone poem that continually grows and falls away in slippery washes of harmony and timbre. Built essentially by submitting other people’s music to a process that freezes and ‘smudges’ small samples of harmonically-rich, looped phrases, these segments cycle through a hypnotic, constantly-evolving landscape that is both enigmatically abstract and warmly familiar.

Story says his choice of Silent Night was an easy one. Its status as the most performed Christmas song ever (Time magazine found over 700 registered recordings of it since the 1970's) makes it instantly recognizable, and the artist, like many, acknowledges how deeply embedded it is in his memories of childhood. This near-universal familiarity makes an ideal canvas for exploring new contexts, and serves perfectly the artist's fondness for the subtle subversion of expectations. But there's another irony that Story fully exploits here. Regardless of one's beliefs, preferences, or notions of privacy, Christmas music is piped mercilessly into our public spaces and over our airwaves—it is ubiquitous, unavoidable. So for some, Silent Night is less beautiful carol than unwitting symbol of the utter overexposure and crassness of the trappings that accompany our modern American 'holiday season'.

Story slyly embraces this dichotomy in the recordings of Silent Night he chooses here - from universally-acclaimed professional recordings to the most banal of YouTube performances, Story's inclusive approach submits a cultural cross-section to his unconventional methods—world-class symphony orchestras and esteemed choirs intersect with novelty karaoke versions, college marching bands, a kazoo performance, and the halting attempts of a beginning guitar student. Essentially stripped of melody and lyric by the artist's processes, only the harmonies and tone colors remain of these wildly disparate elements.

In perhaps the Cycles greatest irony, these unlikely sources coalesce seamlessly into an hour that essentially allows the listener to rediscover the haunting beauty inherent in the iconic carol all along, but which has been dulled for some by overexposure and cliché. "Despite their humble beginnings and artificial evolutions," the artist says, "I hope thesecycles somehow manage to capture more of the sublime soul of Silent Night than do the conventional interpretations that we've simply become insensitive to." Assembled like a sculpture made of recycled objects—with no distinction between the timeless and the disposable, the sacred and the profane—then fired in an oven to soften, integrate and transform, Silent Cycles becomes in the end something much greater than the sum of its parts and processes.

As a composer, this deliberate engagement with the 'other side' of the musical equation—the listener—is never far from Story's work. He is quick to point out how much he relies on his audience to ‘complete’ the perception of the Cycles—that the real key here lies in the listener’s mind, in its predilection to create order and meaning. This human impulse to perceive form and pattern is so strong that it allows even artificial processes like the smudges to yield music that, after just a few listens, feels composed and deliberate. A song like Silent Night, so ubiquitous and rich in connotations for many of us, accelerates the phenomenon, Story says. “It’s astonishing really, how this mechanical, randomized system of smudges—a system which would produce a thousand different 'compositions' in as many tries—seems to generate just the one that we 'want' to hear, one that after only a bit of attention from the listener seems nearly as meticulously crafted —and moving, I hope—as any traditionally-composed piece."

To create the Cycles, Story experimented with hundreds of recordings and configurations, ultimately choosing only those that, in the artist's words, "became profoundly more evocative and harmonically complex than the original source material." Story does not divulge the actual source recordings that he manipulates in Silent Cycles—the ‘who’s who’ matching game that this might encourage would only distract from the immersive, elemental experience intended.Indeed, except for the brief piano introduction (played by Story's 89-year-old mother, reading from the songbook she played from as a child), none of the original unprocessed sound is audible in the cycle's 75-minute span, only the elusive, enveloping results. As in much of Story's recent work, Silent Cycles pokes and prods at our assumptions about appropriation and authorship, and encourages a fresh perspective on the nature of composition and in turn, listening. These graceful slow-motion waves of harmony and atmosphere may ultimately offer something even more elusive—a chance to carve out a moment of repose and reflection amongst the clutter and chaos of the 'holidays'.

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