IAM is an acronym for "Improvised Art Music", but there's a bit of double entendre in the name too, as the phrase "I am" embodies the notion of living in the moment. Writing scads of rational, often prosaic "music for use" (i.e. commercial music) in total isolation eventually drove me to this idea: a synthesizer band (configured like the Philip Glass Ensemble or (David Borden's) Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Company) that improvises communally - and, ideally, without genre boundaries or limitations.

I was very fortunate to meet an excellent composer and keyboard performer named Howard Patterson, who is simultaneously like-minded, and yet often complementary to my way of thinking. We've had a very fruitful collaboration as IAM.

Initially, we concentrated on live performance exclusively, but, after making a few recordings, we came to realize that there were possibilities in some pieces that begged for post-performance polish or re-thinking. So, these recordings came about in various ways:

"Impossibly Slow Motion" was recorded live in studio, with a thin layer of secondary overdubs. It was one of those special times when everything clicks, a story is told, magic flows, and that's that.

"Remembrance of Things that Never Were" started as a live improvisation with MIDI capture. We made some trivial adjustments afterward, but, nonetheless, this was another fortunate occasion when we simultaneously "hit a zone", and sustained it for an extended period of time.

"Revelations of Sunrise" started with a wonderful pad from Howard. We both recall a strong feeling of "time suspended" while playing it initially. We added quite a few overdub layers afterward, and so the final result is complex and kalideoscopic. The title came about from our sense of the piece accompanying a sunrise scene, with the increasing light revealing more and more detail at various levels.

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