SLOW is a sonic laboratory – a long walk through an aural playground.

SLOW takes threads of texture, pattern, melody, and imagery and weaves multimedia tapestries that dilate one’s sense of time. By stretching time's effect on us these weavings serve as an antidote to our culture's growing sense of accelerating fragmentation.

SLOW

FM

Past

Releases

Tracks released on major streaming services

Seaweed Reaches for the Light

Waving sea kelp is rooted to the ocean floor but yearns for the sparkling surface.

Aero Borealis

You are floating on a cloud at night, gazing through the frozen air as the stars are parted by shimmering light...

Cooling Caldera

A legato melody on a complex synthesizer patch, spitting overtones like sparks from molten lava, hardening and darkening as it comes to a standstill.

Photo from the track release Cooling Caldera

Truly Definitely

A spacy trio (tri-et?) rendered by a prayer bowl, an acoustic guitar, and a cavernous reverb — with a bowl/cavern solo mid way through.

Photo from the track release Truly Definitely

Punctuation

A hand-crafted experiment in dicing up time by playing guitar live into analog and digitally modeled electronics.

Photo from the track release Punctuation

Elusive

The next in a series for a forthcoming album, Elusive is two legato melodies searching for and occasionally finding each other.

Photo from the track release Elusive

X Forward
Y Backward

Originally composed as a video soundtrack, Slow revised this piece for audio-only and serves it up as the first piece on an upcoming album.

Photo from the track release X Forward Y Backward

Half baked

Ideas

Experiments.

Works in progress.

Half baked ideas.

Mossy

A short soundtrack to a haunted dream constructed from guitar, analog electronics, and going to bed with a fever.

Counting Horses

An in-progress piece with a baseline that I want to get it out there in raw form before I start problematizing it. If you make it far enough into the video there's a curve ball...

Cooling Caldera

Short vignette of a slowly evolving piece from an upcoming release.

Spinning Plates Some Broken

Improvised audio tape mounted on a violin bow played into digitally modeled electronics.

Events

SAT
October
12

The Weather Diaries

Santa Fe Art Institute Artist-in-Residence Judy Natal will present their live audio-visual performance “The Weather Diaries,” alongside their sonic collaborator, SLOW (aka artist David Zerlin).

FRI
September
07

Links Hall

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WED
October
17

Shubas

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/Texture /Pattern /Melody /Imagery

Four key ingredients to the SLOW/MIX;

Texture — The "sound" of something – its smoothness, say, or its hollowness. Its timbre. Music is traditionally defined by sounds with tonal textures, but expanding outward to include a wider range can make for satisfying compositions.

Pattern — Beats, sections, measures, pulses – elements that can repeat or seam to repeat. Compositional patterns can work in short-term and long-term memory, creating expectations, then fulfilling or thwarting them.

Melody — Tonal material. Periodic content that can string together over time to form melody, or stack vertically to form chords and dissonances. These tend to linger in memory in ways we can repeat mentally whether we want to or not.

Imagery — For sighted people, what we see and what we hear fuses into a coherent experience. "Audio-vision," to quote Michel Chion. From an audience's perspective, audio compositions exist on a spectrum from visually arbitrary to visually intentional.

About

DZ

SLOW is the sonic laboratory of musician and sound artist David Zerlin.

While playing in alternative rock bands in the late 80's David also composed music for Chicago's theater scene. Recognizing the creative potential of sound in dramatic performances, David starting applying compositional techniques theatrical audio, eventually earning two "Jeff" awards.

David went on to formally study the interaction of sound with other time-based media, including creations and collaborations in film, video, performance, and installations. David has taught sound design at the University of Arizona, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Applying compositional strategies to sound, and infusing sonic, traditionally non-musical elements to his creations, David attempts to break down the distinction between sound and music

Late 2010's — Improvisational collaborations with experimental, largely acoustic musicians

Early 2000's — Band that used pop to challenge pop: Puckering Wink

Late 1980's — Alternative rock band: Monica's Interval