ABOUT
MARCH OF DECAY
March of Decay is a one-person vocal noise band, born during quarantine in the endless strip mall wasteland of the Washington DC suburbs.
The name comes from the lunar feature Marsh of Decay, a basaltic plain on the near side of the moon. I changed 'marsh' to 'march' since the latter word is more rhythmic and energetic. The name March of Decay also contains a paradox, since marching implies a sustained forward motion, while decay implies slowing towards cessation. The name is also reminiscent of the physics concept of entropy, in which a closed system will tend towards increasing disorder ... i.e., noise.
My philosophy on music is this: the world is awash with songs, from every culture and genre, about ourselves. As a species, we harness our boundless creativity to write incessantly about our own emotional lives and interpersonal relationships. There is a place for such music in every culture and genre, but March of Decay finds this subject to be a bit tedious. In fact, I believe that this self-obsession forms its own form of noise, in which songs about ourselves distract us from larger topics in nature and society.
Therefore, I'm not here to sing you songs about love. Or about hate. Or sex or loneliness. My songs are not about me, nor are they about you.
Rather, I'm here to bring you songs about science, nature, philosophy, and sociology. I am a naturalist at heart; I believe that beauty can be found in the crashing of a wave, in the eyes of a praying mantis, in the burning core of a star. My songs are about time and evolution, volcanoes and disease, philosophy and society. They are glimpses of the vast world in which we exist for a brief second before disappearing forever.
It is not that I will never write a song about humans. It is just that my music attempts to put humans in their rightful place, as one small part of a sprawling, indifferent universe.
But these are not songs about fluffy little bunnies hopping among flowerbeds. I prefer the darker corners of the universe: I love supernovas more than sunny days; carnivorous plants more than flowers, inhospitable wastelands more than strolls through a pleasant meadow. Although, now that I think about it, even a fluffy bunny looks like a horrible monster to the grass that it eats.
But why make noise music? My love of nature has led me to appreciate non-human sounds. The audio patterns that we have declared to be pleasing – the major scales, the 4/4 time, playful melodies, the smooth timbres – are part of the human world that I find artificial and overused. So, I tend to leave such tools to other artists. As a sound designer, I find the raw power of feedback, found sounds, static, dissonance, and distortion to be more interesting mediums of expression. It is not that I never use the usual tools of music theory; just that I seek to put them in their place as a minor branch of the vast array of possible sounds.
In short, Music is Artificial. Nature is Noise.