Dreamer Dreamt
The Humbling
Vermont
See You at Riis
Speaking Sentences Backwards
Filling Holes
Between Isolation
Earth is a Breathing Valley
Music for Unfinished Instruments
Acoustic Ephemera
Partials (from the frozen mud field)
Intimate Views
Continuous Becoming
Interrobang
Light, Color and Geometry
Dark and Pretty Flat
Vortex

Cody Boyce is an artist and musician based in Queens, NY. He has composed for dance, film and installation, including collaborations with his sister, choreographer Esmé Boyce; filmmakers Joseph Barglowski, Robert Orlowski, Miriam Gabriel and Sophia de Baun; and artists Matthew Schreiber, Osvald Landmark and Ryan Hartley Smith. He makes improvised music with Matti Weisberg, aka Fruiting Body.

Music for Unfinished Instruments

2021

Recorded and mixed by Cody Boyce
Mastered by Sean McCann

Raphael Peterson – piano on “Porous Sense”
Dan Catucci – cymbals on “Dust”
Matti Weisberg – trumpet on “Dust”
Che Chen – double bass on “Dust”
Talice Lee – violin on “Dust,” vocals on “Calcified (Talice’s Song)”
Cody Boyce – guitars, zithers, square wave oscillator, MS-20 mini, effects pedals, mixer, electronics, tape machine, software

Cover photo by Kyle Richardson

Music for Unfinished Instruments materialized gradually, pieced together from fragments performed in different spaces between the fall of 2018 and the summer of 2021. The idea was just to use the studio. To make time for participants and instruments to sound together, and to gently form the results into something with discernible structure. Alongside these efforts, I had been making alterations to three zither instruments. Using pickups, oscillators, and other basic electronics, I was feeling out a personal way to play with harmonics, tuning, and feedback. Many of the first zither recordings have a charming inelegance to them, as I stumbled across gestures that were newly available through physical changes. So, the approach rippled out to other musical elements as the sessions continued. With most of the parts only roughly sketched out beforehand, this music is open: open to the contributions of both the musicians and the instruments, open in its sense of space and movement through time, open-hearted. The title then refers to the literal instruments in progress, but also to myself and my collaborators as unfinished instruments—still variable, still capable of something else.