nice eMusic Spotlight interview with jayson greene up online now. here's the opening gambit:
"What happens when a bunch of classical nerds get together and try to build an AOR-Rock Masterpiece? It sounds like the setup to a rather obscure joke, and the scenario might sound deeply unpromising. But this is exactly what composer William Brittelle set out to do. His new record, Television Landscape, out on New Amsterdam Records, is the result of an overwhelmingly cerebral attempt to make visceral, anthemic power rock music as Brittelle knows and loves it from his youth. Brittelle, a dropout from the Graduate Center program in New York for Composition, couldn't bring himself to do this in the more intuitive way other bands might. His Epic Rock Album, perhaps unlike most others, began with a scaled, computer model with every single guitar lick, drum fill, and interlude completely notated.
This might seem like trying to build a particle accelerator in order to grill a hamburger, but the shocking thing about Television Landscape is that it worked. Television Landscape is all the things one expects from an epic art-rock album: expansive, anthemic, all-encompassing, shot through with raw emotion. The warm, analog production feels bathed in cathode rays, and songs veer fluidly and seemingly unselfconsciously from AM-radio power-ballads to sustained passages of string writing that recall French composers like Faure and Debussy. And back again. "The idea was basically that I should just do everything that I think is awesome, all at the same time, all on one record, instead of compartmentalizing things," Brittelle laughs. Recently, he sat down with eMusic's Jayson Greene along with Lawson White, the record's engineer; Marc Danzigers, the guitarist on the record and a member of the NOW Ensemble; and several other players on the record to discuss learning to embrace pop culture, trying not be weirder than Kid A, and finding your secret music."
Click here for the whole thing.