Composer & Percussionist Chris P. Thompson Releases New Album 'Stay The Same'

Composer and percussionist Chris P. Thompson has released new album, Stay the Same – listen here. Stay the Same features a thoughtful and nuanced blend of electronic and microtonal music –– two styles that greatly influenced, informed, and shaped Thompson's four earlier albums: 2021's Red Folder, 2020's True Stories & Rational Numbers, 2019's Everything Imaginable Comes True, and 2017's Lot Hero (EP). Thompson explains: “Stay the Same integrates the two [musical approaches] in a way that feels super natural to me as a continuation of my own story, and yet the juxtaposition is also likely to feel quite unexpected to the rest of the world.”

Of the meaning behind the Selfie, Thompson explains, “Selfie imagines a state of mind like an empty museum — the pictures have been taken off the walls, leaving only the placards. Stripped of judgement or meaning, an image can appear only as a purely objective description of itself and ultimately, of the viewer. While reaching this mindset might be aspirational for a meditative practice, it makes for a very bizarre experience from within the hyperreal simulacra of a social media feed.”

In addition to Thompson's emphasis on blending two musical styles, each of the tracks on Stay the Same contributes to an overall presentation of symmetrical contrast throughout the album –– an aspect that is especially appreciable in the album's vinyl format. For each track on Side A, its corresponding track on Side B serves as both mirror image and flip side of the coin. Meanwhile, extreme contrasts in energy level from one track to the next paint a picture of emotional swings: anxious and manic highs versus paralyzed lows.

The first five works, which make up Side A on vinyl –– Stay the Same, Mirror, The Help You Need, Different Pressures, and Sculpture Garden –– ride a breathless spiral of inwardly-focused psychological tension to its breaking point and ghostly aftermath. The second half of the album, or Side B –– Selfie, Wall, Changes, Philip Thinking, and UV Garden –– holds up a mirror to a narcissistic external world, escapes its grasp, and floats through the ashes after it self-destructs.

Thompson says: “This music lives in cycles of misguided self-help, and the irony of purchasing a cure from the same doctor who sold you the disease. It grew from a very personal realization that in the end there are no solutions, no answers, and no destination. There is only the path that leads in a new direction, or the one that circles right back to where you started.”

Thompson released his fourth solo album True Stories & Rational Numbers in October 2020. A nine-movement work sequenced as electronic music but also fully scored for four keyboardists, it represents Thompson's investigation of just intonation and the natural mathematics of rhythm and harmony, his search for a performance practice to incorporate these into live contemporary music, and his personal fan-fiction about physicist Hermann von Helmholtz and his second wife, writer Anna von Helmholtz. True Stories & Rational Numbers received its world premiere live performance at the Barbican Centre in London in November 2021. Red Folder, a collaboration with playwright Rajiv Joseph for the Steppenwolf Theater's STEPPENWOLF NOW series was released in early 2021. Following the release of that project, Thompson worked with the same team on a follow-on educational program, The Red Folder Project, which reached over 5,000 young people in 70 different schools.

Thompson's first two records, the LP Everything Imaginable Comes True (2019) and EP Lot Hero (2017), draw heavily on the high-energy sound world of modern drum and bugle corps, while incorporating luminaries of the New York City contemporary classical music scene in both familiar and unexpected capacities. Thompson has also had the opportunity to work both as a performing percussionist and arranger on a wide variety of projects with a diverse range of composers and performers.