Seventeenth Hotel

The five songs of The Seventeenth Hotel share a number of features—rich electronic soundscapes, lopsided beguiling beats, gorgeous vocals, introspective lyrics—all at the intersection of experimental electronic music, composition and songwriting: a kind of electro-sonic song-tapestry. Says Trueman:

"All of the songs on The Seventeenth Hotel emerged from explorations of a set of “listening machines” I created in 2020, called Machines for Listening. Each machine has settings and interconnections that yield seemingly unpredictable rhythms and textures, but which are in fact completely deterministic, a product of how the musician and machine work together.

The Machines for Listening and The Seventeenth Hotel began in June of 2020, with the world in imperfect lockdown and raging against centuries of racial injustice. I’m indebted of course to the legacy of Pauline Oliveros, whom I had the pleasure of playing with many times years ago, and whose “machines for listening” are monumental.

The cover centers on a piece by my visual-artist mother, Judy Trueman; the image of dried, colorful flowers emerging from a grid of plotted equations matches perfectly the Machines for Listening, where unusual musical grids are the foundation for nonlinear growth, including the unexpected songs of The Seventeenth Hotel."

For this album, Trueman worked closely with his daughter—songwriter and producer Molly Trueman—and long-time collaborator Jason Treuting—percussionist and composer of Sō Percussion—along with the inventive engineer Matt Poirier and bassist/composer Florent Ghys on this studio project, bringing to bear his own invented electronic/acoustic instrument bitKlavier and the resonant glories of the Hardanger d’Amore, which Trueman had a hand in conceiving.