After a hike in Washington’s wet Hoh Rainforest, Santa Barbara–born avant-garde composer, record label founder, and author Sean McCann lit a candle in his hotel room and recorded the sound of the flickering flame. He paired with this whisper the gurgle of the hotel coffee machine, rolling a pair of dice to let fate decide how the sounds would harmonize with an equally randomized set of melodies. The resulting piece fell together, with many spaces and silences punctuating the subtle sounds.
This unreleased piece was not unusual for McCann, who is a man unafraid to take chances. Since graduating Dos Pueblos High School in 2006 and studying broadcasting and communication arts at San Francisco State University, he has released dozens of experimental creations, ranging from dense synth clouds on limited-release cassettes to more stately minimalist string and piano compositions. He also runs a record label, Recital, on which he releases avant-garde and electronic works by composers both contemporary and long-standing, such as Annea Lockwood and Loren Connors. Somehow, he also manages to fit in a fulltime job providing production support for sound engineers.
McCann’s newest offering isn’t music at all, in fact, but rather a book: Pacifics, released December 1. Pacifics is a 65-page poem created from a vast word bank, two years’ worth of words and phrases randomized and manipulated into abstraction. “It's definitely a new adventure for me,” McCann said, citing the poems and graphical scores of John Cage and Dick Higgins and the novels of Gertrude Stein as inspiration. “The idea of releasing a book, something less ethereal but more personal, more close to home and close to the ocean, was something that I wanted to put myself through.”