Sometimes an idea starts out one way and ends up another. Both Sideband and the Sideband Chronicles are ideas like that, and while they started in one place, we still don’t quite know where they will end up. The Sideband Chronicles will tell that story; we’ve written the first few, and will share the rest as we find them.

Sideband began as the professional offshoot of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk), a big, shambling curricular initiative that lurched into existence in 2005. The mission of PLOrk is to try to find music and ways of making music together with, well, laptops, but more generally, with computation, regardless of the packaging, and to do some learning along the way. Sideband’s mission began similarly, but with a smaller sustained membership of about a dozen experienced musicians and composers, all of whom worked with PLOrk at some point, with learning being optional (though seemingly inevitable, and some of it on the part of the machines themselves). Many of our pieces began with PLOrk, though as time has gone on we’ve come to be less concerned with computation and more interested in just making music together as people, regardless of the tools. That said, at this point, all of our pieces use computation in some form.

And that is where the Chronicles begin, with these pieces. We’ve got a bunch of them now, and we are very excited about them. They are all over the map, quite different than one another, and we’d like to share them. Being a band, if a sideband, we of course thought we’d make an album, a CD, for the sharing. We recorded them, audio and video, and soon realized we had at least a double-CD, and what to do with the video…. DVD? No self-respecting techno-geek band could ever release a DVD in 2014!

We also realized that how these pieces are played is a bit of mystery, and pretty interesting if we may say so ourselves. We’d love it if others took an interest in playing them, or making their own versions of them, so we thought we would offer some information about what might be involved, how to get started, why these pieces might be fun and interesting to try, and so on, along with the audio and video.

Finally, we’ve got quite a few pieces, and more in the works, and if we are not making a CD with a fixed maximum length, what’s the point in, say, stopping at 12 tracks?

Hence, the Sideband Chronicles, an ongoing, open-ended collection of pieces, beautifully recorded and filmed, with information about the pieces themselves, how they are played, and how to get started playing them yourselves, if you are so bold.

We begin with Jascha Narveson’s In Line, and subsequent releases we will include Anne Hege’s From the Waters, Jeff Snyder’s Undeciphered Writing, Konrad Kaczmarek’s Balls (yes, it’s true), my own Four Squared for Ligeti, and others, some already written, others yet to be written…. these are chronicles, after all, and we are still not sure exactly where this is all going to lead.

–Dan Trueman, founding-member, Sideband.