The Michigan-based composer and multi-instrumentalist discusses Solo Three, his trilogy-closing collection of solo reinterpretations of works by Steve Reich, Glenn Branca, Charlemagne Palestine, and Laurie Spiegel.
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Today we’re putting The Tonearm's needle on musician and composer Erik Hall.
Based in Michigan, Erik Hall has spent the last five years doing something that sounds simple but definitely is not: recording landmark works of contemporary classical music entirely on his own.
Erik’s 2020 solo reconstruction of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians won the Libera Award for Best Classical Record. Reich wrote to tell him he'd reinvented the piece. A 2023 interpretation of Simeon ten Holt's Canto Ostinato followed, and now Hall has completed the trilogy. Solo Three came out in January on Western Vinyl, and it takes on works by Glenn Branca, Charlemagne Palestine, Laurie Spiegel, and Reich again—every note performed and recorded by Hall himself, no loops, no sequencers.
Erik is here to walk us through the project and the thinking behind it. Enjoy.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Erik Hall’s Solo Three)
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00:00 — Introduction
01:46 — From trilogy to multi-composer collection: the evolution of Solo Three
03:18 — What separates this project from a covers album
04:29 — Discovering Music for 18 Musicians in the college library
06:16 — Why Reich's music feels timeless
07:16 — Reading the score: seeing the brush strokes
07:48 — The painter copying the master: inhabiting a composer's thinking
08:50 — Living with Reich's music over the decades
09:14 — The desert island record, and his wife's pivotal suggestion
12:43 — Studio process: reconstructing the works piece by piece
13:25 — Playing faithful to the score — and where the liberties come in
16:02 — Laurie Spiegel's "A Folk Study": treating it more like a cover
17:39 — Why everything is performed live — and what that actually means
19:39 — Studio immersion, lost time, and the meditative pull of the music
21:59 — Doing it all: performance, engineering, mixing
22:37 — The case for and against producing alone
26:10 — The mix as arrangement
27:07 — Steve Reich's reaction to the first album
29:32 — Accepting encouragement without losing your compass
31:26 — How this trilogy has reshaped his identity as an artist
33:36 — Minimalism's growing audience and what it offers now
37:37 — The upside of the entire recorded canon being available to everyone
39:57 — Imperfection, the human element, and why some people hear Kraftwerk as cold
43:13 — Album art and the visual world of the trilogy with Aaron Lowell Denton
44:54 — When music and visual design actually come together
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Visit Erik Hall at → http://www.erikhall.net
and follow him on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/intallbuildings
Bluesky → https://bsky.app/profile/erikhallmusic.bsky.social
and Facebook → https://www.facebook.com/erikhallofficial
Purchase Erik Hall’s album 'Solo Three' from Western Vinyl → https://westernvinyl.com/shop/wv291
Bandcamp → https://erikhall.bandcamp.com/album/solo-three
or Qobuz → https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/album/solo-three-erik-hall/ajuyaz2nac6fa
and listen on your streaming platform of choice → https://lnk.to/solothree
For extensive show notes, links, and podcast information, go to https://podcast.thetonearm.com
Be sure to check out The Tonearm, an online music + culture magazine featuring fascinating perspectives and conversations with creative people → https://www.thetonearm.com
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The Tonearm on Bluesky → https://bsky.app/profile/thetonearm.com
The Tonearm on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-tonearm
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