Electronic dance music makes a splash in Monterey County's music scene.

Monterey County is all about diverse music styles, but it's widely understood electronica is just not a Monterey thing—not in the way jazz, blues, reggae, or even Americana is. A solo debut track, “Secant,” by Monterey-based Lanier Sammons is a small but encouraging step in a new direction.

The EDM track—now available online, along with a striking music video—was composed, performed and engineered by Sammons out of his home studio. Sammons is an associate professor of recording and technology at CSU Monterey Bay. The video was made by Sammons’ colleague at CSUMB, Timothy David Orme, who teaches animation in the film department. But it's a treat to listen to, even without the video—or to watch without the music.

The track “grows from a gritty, cello-and-piano intro to a hazy, evolving texture with a wavering trumpet pad, an unreliable drum machine, and other voices emerging and receding,” the artists wrote, describing the build of the song. “Sammons’ sparse, processed vocals hint at loss and transformation in a structure that eschews traditional song form.”

Created entirely by Orme, the half hand-painted, half digitally animated video matches the song’s uneasy mood. Glimpses of a narrative emerge as a mysterious cycloptic figure traverses a haunting landscape. The video marks a third collaboration between the two artists.

Sammons teaches composition and engineering to students who want to start careers as pop artists and singer-songwriters. 

“It sounded like fun, I thought that I would like to do that too,” he says about the experience of trying his strengths as a singer and the author of lyrics for the first time, officially at least.  

It has been fun. Sammons and Orme have worked together on other projects before. 

“I knew he is very much interested in making music videos and he told me to send music to him,” Sammons says. That's how "Secant" was born.

Before we go any further, we should explore the meaning of the title itself, since it’s something—electronica artists love abstract concepts as titles—most of us have to Google to understand. To save you a minute, in mathematics, secant is the ratio of the hypotenuse to the shorter side adjacent to an acute angle; the reciprocal of a cosine. In geometry, it is a straight line that cuts a curve in two or more parts.

“The silver lining to the lockdown was that I had time for my own music,” Sammons says.

He has a few more pieces he is working on and is considering collecting them until they form a sort of an album, but then the “entity” of an album has changed since within the last two decades, becoming less and less relevant.  

Sammons composes for film, installations and concert halls. He has engineered and  produced for a wide range of artists. As a performer, he got his start as lead guitarist in Macon, Georgia, before playing with bands in New York, Charlottesville, where he obtained a Ph.D. in composition, and then Santa Cruz. In addition to teaching at CSUMB since 2012, he is a member of the Zimbabwean marimba ensemble Sadza and their Afro-pop incarnation SadzaMoto.

Orme works in all genres of film and animation—experimental, narrative, music video and documentary. He showed his work at countless festivals and art venues. His most recent film was a juried film at the 2022 Thomas Edison Film Festival in New Jersey.