L I N E R N O T E S - - - - ALL BY MYSELF - - - - Kirsten Lies-Warfield

1. Swarm
2. Mangabey Rag
3. State of Play
4. Three Calls by Brad Edwards
Mystery
Frenzy
Serenity
5. Natural Skin
6. Winter’s Exile, text by Robert Bland
7. Washing is how the day begins
8. Consummation

Recorded 2021-2022 at my home studio in Brentwood, Maryland. All work is by me unless otherwise noted.
Thanks to those in the audio technology program at American University, both faculty and students, for teaching me so much. Special thanks to Ryan Barry for sharing his car sounds. Credit is also due to my dog, Sonneck for his sneeze performance and my late dog, Rae for her beautiful vocals.

I didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew I wanted to do something. Swarm is very much a product of my ethos of “let’s see what happens if I do this;” a tapestry of bits of recorded trombone woven tightly together. Through the process, the trombone sound is both obscured and revealed, textures evolve and create an organically pulsing rhythm that moves and changes like those schools of fish or murmuration of starlings or…a swarm.

I wrote Mangabey Rag in 2015 so that I could have something fun to play. In 2020 while we were in COVID lockdown, I shared the piece with trombone colleagues. Brad Edwards returned the favor sending me his Three Calls that I really fell in love with. He tells me he actually started composing that piece while staying with me in 2020 for the American Trombone Workshop.

State of Play is titled for how it came about. I got a new midi keyboard with more than 25 keys, found a sound bank that tickled me and just started playing with it. Other play sessions yielded many other ideas, most of which will probably never see the light of day, but the fittest did survive to make the recording, stitched together with threads of trombone.

Natural Skin came from thoughts on my brother’s divorce. Written in 2019-2020. I performed it a couple of times but it was not quite hitting right. In this recorded version, I’ve finally realized my vision for the piece. This realization was made possible by the audio technology program at American University that taught me how to manipulate my sounds and make cool things happen.

I met Robert Bland when I moved to Brentwood in 2017 through a wonderful group called, Community Supported Music. Robert, a poet, and I collaborated to perform at our neighborhood Porch Fest. This piece comes from one of those collaborations. The poem is me. Those who know me well know how I love the dirt up under my nails. I get the fever every spring.

I wrote Washing is how the day begins in my final year in the United States Army Band, “Pershing’s Own.” This is how I process the trauma of what happened to me there, * the gaslighting, the marginalization, the isolation and the betrayal. My workplace had become a somewhere that I could not exist, and yet I had to. I could not speak, I could only cry, surrounded by former friends who would not help even though they had ascended to the highest enlisted ranks. I endured two years like that and made it to retirement where I can freely reap the blessings of that retirement, one of which is the GI Bill that paid me to go back to school at American University and create this album.
This is also a new and improved version of this piece which saw its premier at the International Women’s Brass Conference in 2019.

I don’t feel the need to write love songs, instead, I muse on the human condition in Consummation. We just can’t help ourselves, engineered as we are to be masters of resource acquisition and exploitation. It was a good game plan for the first 300,000 years, but now, it’s gotten just a bit out of hand.


Thanks to my beautiful husband Patrick for always encouraging me…even when he probably shouldn’t. I love you still and more than ever.


*See the blog on my website where I wrote extensively to relieve the trauma. Long Story Short