David Torn (a.k.a. "splattercell"), born in New York, is a film-composer, producer, ECM recording artist and guitarist/multi-instrumentalist known for an expansive musical voice bridging a wide arc of idioms, periods and contexts. His groundbreaking textural work has influenced film scoring and electro-acoustic and electronic music, and current musical technologies. David has scored films including Friday Night Lights, Lars & The Real Girl, The Wackness, Everything Must Go, The Order, Saint John of Las Vegas, The Line, Teenage Paparazzo, and many others. His ensemble work has graced the musical output of artists including David Bowie, Tim Berne, Jeff Beck, Tori Amos, Madonna, Jan Garbarek, Laurie Anderson, Chocolate Genius, John Legend and kd lang. David studied with guitarists John Abercrombie and Pat Martino, and as a youth, with Leonard Bernstein. Among his awards are two Grammys, and three Readers' Poll Awards from Guitar Player magazines.

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I’ll be premiering a piece for solo guitar, oud and live-sampling/modifications; it’s entitled, “only sky.”

Ongoing, incredible neurological research engages and stimulates and is likely of inestimable worth. My internal, primarily musical sensibilities, though, lead me to wondering about our brains’ indelible interdependencies w/things ephemeral, things mysterious, maybe ‘mystical’: interests which folks may deem ‘spiritualistic’ or ‘religious’, but for which I, myself, have no concretizing words-of-weight.

I suppose that’s why I’m simply a musician and irredeemable sky gazer. I’m not a scribe, not a scientist-poet, nor am I analytically focused, what with the limits-set on heartbeats available for loon-spinning ‘round this sweet/harsh, brutal/generous bluebrowngreenred lumpy-ball-of-a-planet.

I sky gaze; the sky seems more like mind than brain, but . . .

“only sky,” while composed, is purposefully made flexible to its environment, for performer and audience; it can never be performed, again, as it will be, here. This reflects how I’ve come to perceive music, life, and my own wee brain . . . which apparently exhibits a neurological “peculiarity” with which I live, momentarily and happily.