Track By Track: Davis Galvin – Prism (Delphinium Elatum)

“Sense of Place and acoustemology are themes I like to explore in my work,” Galvin explains, detailing their unorthodox compositional process that transforms everyday wanderings into raw musical material. Their innovative scoring system incorporates “hammer-dyed pieces of cardstock with flowermarks made using petals from the Delphinium Elatum flowers” alongside “lines derived from tracings of maps of my walking in San Francisco, Mexico City, Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh.”

The result is a radical reimagining of how physical spaces and organic matter can be transformed into sound, with each piece creating a listening experience that’s both intellectually challenging and viscerally immersive.

Standing at the intersection of natural world documentation and experimental electronic composition, Prism ask listeners to reconsider their relationship with both urban and natural environments.

Below, Davis takes us on a track-by-track journey through the colours, seasons, inspirations, and settings that shaped each piece on this groundbreaking album.

1 – Sipes’ Vista:

COLOUR: Sky blue, streaks of white clouds

SEASON: Full verdancy

INSPO: Wide lens, stillness, a breeze crosses the back of your neck. You can see forever, but it goes even farther than you can see. Functionally, “Sipes’ Vista” softly pulls inward, dissolving the boundary between outside thoughts and the music, semi-obtrusively melding with the listener’s local sound signature.

SETTING: pictured here: on the way up to Sipes’ Vista.

2 – Humidity 14

COLOUR: Sandpaper

SEASON: Dead of winter

INSPO: Macro lens, the closer you look the more movement there is underneath. This is the first piece on the album in which the score was used to sequence certain elements. The album’s scores are based on the score for John Cage’s “Fontana Mix”. 

The score has 4 components:

1. Hammer-dyed pieces of cardstock with flowermarks made using petals from the Delphinium Elatum flowers. The flower marks were set by randomly scattering the petals.
2. Lines drawn on transparent sheets. The lines are derived from tracings of maps of my walking in San Francisco, Mexico City, Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh, where this album was recorded. For each transparency there are 4 variations on the lines, either in thickness or in marking.
3. A small graph on a transparent sheet, measured 100 units horizontally and 20 vertically.
4. A straight line on a transparent sheet.

To use the score, place a transparency over a cardstock (in any position). Over these, place the graph. Use the straight line transparency to connect a flowermarking within the graph with a flowermarking outside the graph. The graph units horizontally can be designated to be any amount of time. Intersections of the straight line transparency and the walking transparency along the horizontal graph units specify alterations of the original source sound. In “Humidity 14” this process was used to sequence both delay amounts and timing as well as certain frequency adjustments within the brushed drums.

Sense of Place and acoustemology are themes I like to explore in my work, and this was a new avenue for involving those while introducing a source of randomness. I’ve included some potential sets of transparencies and cardstocks here, though they are not the exact scores used for the album, as I’ve omitted the graph and guiding line.

SETTING: A place out of time 

3 – Grasshopper (Solo)

COLOUR: Where the bark meets the leaf.

SEASON: Is it still summer? It should be autumn.

INSPO: Spending time in Chapultepec Park, the field recordings in this piece are recorded from here. Prism is quasi-split into three movements, and with “Sipes’ Vista” and “Humidity 14”, this completes the first movement. Together, the three parts of the first movement are meant to do a scrubbing refocus of the listener. “Sipes’ Vista” softly pulls inward. “Humidity 14” burnishes the slate clean by approaching a rhythmic white noise, emphasizing a palette categorically contrasting “Sipes’ Vista”. Finally, “Grasshopper (Solo)” introduces the first relation of melody, welcoming in the listener totally. In this piece the score was used to sequence some of the parameters of the field recordings.

SETTING: Deep late summer heat, urban park activity juxtaposed by the stillness of the symphonic insects as the sun sets.

4 – Antic Swoops

COLOUR: Grey.

SEASON: It’s a bit windy, though not too cold!

INSPO: Somewhat inspired by the Martin Galvin poem “Sunbathing”, from which “Antic Swoops” derives its name. Compositionally/proportionally, the idea here is to move downward from “Grasshopper (Solo)”. A slow set of distant (and not so) creatures reveal themselves, underpinned by the rhythmically shifting but wholly unchanging landscape. The score was used here to sequence the movement of the creatures. It marks the beginning of the second movement. 

SETTING: Early morning beach, where the sand meets the water meets the fog. It’s easy to let the ocean keep time as the movements of the rest of the world create the music around it.

5 – 220928_Point Five, One, Two, Four, Three Ways

COLOUR: Several

SEASON: Several

INSPO: Bifurcating the album and acting as a bridge, this piece comes from a period of experimental fm synthesis compositions. the title is a marking of the date of the composition and the ratios of the fm operators. the piece’s key modulates stepwise around the circle of fifths, starting in the home key of “Antic Swoops” and delivering the listener to the destination key of the second movement’s climax, “Prism”.

SETTING: Hazy, like a memory you’re only starting to remember.

6 – Prism

COLOUR: Refracted light.

SEASON: Bright springtime.

INSPO: Originally partially written for a performance in a park in Pittsburgh in 2022, the steam of harmonies disseminating from “Prism” were developed in 2024. The piece’s primary compositional purpose is to act upon the physical feeling of the sound on your ear. To that end it sounds nice in headphones, but better if you can sit yourself in front of a pair of speakers. This acts as the climax of the second movement.

SETTING: A great listen at points of transition – sunset, take-off during a flight, breakups, etc.

7 – Matched Pair of Hemispheres

COLOUR: Night sky ink.

SEASON: Late fall, early winter.

INSPO: ”Matched Pair of Hemispheres” is a weft of many rhodes riffs and starcrushed bits of funk. Often my piano-playing practice takes the forms of developing short, repeating riffs and playing them for hours until they’ve fully sunk in. For this piece the score served to sequence some of the parameter changes in the warp of the atmosphere. The sense of propulsion here carries the listener into the third act..

SETTING: I’ve been told and tend to agree that this one is a wonderful accompaniment for stargazing (a nice bonus if “Prism” played just before, during the last bit of sunset!).

8 – Marine Layer

COLOUR: Cerulean.

SEASON: Late May/early June.

INSPO: “Marine Layer” is watching forms elucidate themselves in the morning fog, an exercise in patience. Whisps form in the first half of the composition, until a full-focused second half reveals itself as the cause of the temperature inversion. The back half of “Marine Layer” ended up taking on more and more of an r&b character the further I wrote it, so I followed that thread a bit through the end.

SETTING: San Francisco

9 – Naming It

COLOUR: A whole bouquet!

SEASON: Blooming, anew.

INSPO: ”Naming It” is meant as a propulsive force for the listener. The album’s cycle has completed, and this final send-off can act as a perennial reminder that even from the depths new energy can bloom. Congratulations, it’s spring once again!

SETTING: At the outset.

You can purchase Prism (Delphinium Elatum) on cassette (comes with a packet of seeds) or the digital album via the Music To Watch Seeds Grow By Bandcamp here.