This article was translated into Chinese for the festival.
Something that always impresses me with Daly’s work is his commitment to Music. That is to say Music with a capital M. I don’t think his work does much to veer into ‘sound art’ or ‘sound’ at all. Perhaps this is a strength — one of his strengths for me has always been his use of time and expectation — but perhaps it leaves people thinking of his music as having a relatively flat affect.
Daly’s main interest seems to be in the monophonic guitar. I’ve shared perhaps a bit of a distaste with him for the way that the guitar is played as a ‘default musical’ instrument without a lot of variation in approach. The apparent result of this is a lot of un-effected dry tone with slides and bends. Daly uses more intrinsic instrumental sound (attack, pitch, decay, and so on).
In my view, Daly has a very textual approach in this way. The guitar work really isn’t that dissimilar to sound poetry in the traditional sense, and by some measure he’s produced work that is ‘really’ traditional sound poetry (e.g., track 2 of ‘Unprompted Trio Movement or Some Timbre Transfer Sequences’, among others). The guitar itself ends up functioning as a ‘voice’ (after all, the voice is also monophonic). Indeed, his works are packed dense with references to other music, literature, and academic writings.
Some thought should be given to humour and levity. There’s nothing ultimately po-faced in his work, but we shouldn’t take it lightly either. The control of silence is something that stand-up comedians use in a similar way: build expectation, repeat where you might not expect, and so on. Daly does similar; it’s a pivot away from textual comedy, but there are setups and punchlines sometimes in the same respect.
Daly (and Maggiore’s!) approach ends up being very ‘constructed’, in opposition to the post-Cagian acolytes who perhaps are more interested in setting up the Rube Goldberg machine that drops the guillotine on the musician. Daly is interested in the articulation and shaping of sound, the gaps between notes, in contrast to music that is ‘a lot of sound moving gradually between states’ or ‘spamming notes to create tension’.
Kieran Daly is a Chicago-based composer and guitarist. His work has been presented at a lot of venues and published in a lot of places, there’s better information on his website to this effect.
Thomas Carroll, published 2026
Thanks to Joshua Adam Acosta, Dan Welch