We tend to think of the past as what happened, the present as what’s happening right now, and the future as what’s to come, but the truth is that we are constantly engaged in the work of refashioning and recontextualizing the past. For composer and musician Grant Cutler, that process is at the center of his work. Self Portrait is Cutler’s third album for innova, following 2012 in 2011 and his collaboration with composer and producer Chris Campbell in 2013. Working with acclaimed musicians including Michael Lewis, Aby Wolf, Sarah Pajunen, Michelle Kinney and Jacqueline Ultan, and others, Cutler recorded artists improvising to delayed recordings of themselves, a kind of sonic déjà vu where memory and experience blend together in an evolving present. Slowly evolving colors wash over the listener; as though placing a mic in front of a fresh Rothko. In this way, this Self Portrait becomes a portrait not just of Cutler, but of all the musicians involved, and even becomes an act of memoir, an active reimagining of the self. Weaving together the capsules of time created by the musicians, Cutler pulls the tangent together into a long, circling recollection. This allows the music to become landscape, story, and document all at once. At first, the music here might sound spare, but repeated experiences with it peel back layers and reveal the beating human heart beneath it. Sound becomes a memory, cut up and rearranged in the retelling, then recorded again as a new memory, beginning the process over again.
