New Focus Recordings
Catalytic is excited to be collaborating on some cross-promotion of several albums released by New York City based New Focus Recordings, exploring some ways that aesthetic boundaries can overlap between scenes. We’ll host several New Focus titles that explore some of those common musical components on our stream for a limited time.
New Focus Recordings is a New York City based label focused on creative music of all stripes, founded by guitarist Dan Lippel, composer Peter Gilbert, and composer/engineer Ryan Streber in 2004, to create a space for artist curated full length recordings that were cohesive and concept oriented. The core catalogue focuses on contemporary classical releases but the label has released music across several genres and musical practices, and includes several imprints such as the early music sub-label Olde Focus Recordings, the International Contemporary Ensemble’s TUNDRA imprint, and SEAMUS records (Society for Electro-acoustic Music in the United States). The artists New Focus has released include some of the most active and prominent composers, ensembles, and individual performers in contemporary music, including composers, Kate Soper, Michael Hersch, George Lewis, Dai Fujikura, Anthony Cheung, Wang Lu, Scott Wollschleger, Du Yun, Reiko Füting, Marcos Balter, Lei Liang, ensembles including the International Contemporary Ensemble, Ekmeles, Talea Ensemble, loadbang, JACK Quartet, Mivos Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Third Coast Percussion, and The Crossing, and performers Claire Chase, Tony Arnold, Movses Pogossian, Ning Yu, and David Kaplan.
As the contemporary classical music world expands with new explorations in improvisation and alternative notation, the points of contact with the creative improvisation and creative original music world increase. The albums New Focus director Dan Lippel curated for this round of inclusion on Catalytic’s stream were chosen with those points of contact in mind.
VURT Cycle
VURT Cycle
“On his second release for New Focus, composer Alexander Sigman turns to science fiction, specifically the work of UK based author Jeff Noon, for inspiration. Using his dystopian novel “Vurt” as a jumping off point, Sigman maps paradigms active within Noon’s work on musical parameters, tying the works in the “VURT Cycle” together through several recurring principles. Noon’s exploration of the hybridization of species manifests itself in Sigman’s interest in recycled musical material; the characteristics of parallel universes in “Vurt” are expressed through the dichotomy and integration of live instruments and electronics. The pervasive portrayal of urban decay and ruin creeps into Sigman’s works as a sonic frame, and the influence on Noon of British New Wave bands shows up in samples in Sigman’s electronic palette. Sigman conjures an unfamiliar, futuristic world in the music of the “VURT Cycle,” expertly capturing science fiction’s penchant for challenging assumptions and extrapolating possibilities.
The opening work on the recording, “VURTRUVURT” for solo violin and electronics performed here by Havnal Pivnick, employs an unconventional method for the media playback. The electronic sounds are projected through a pair of small sound “exciters” attached to the violin and a resonating glass surface, placing the violin in a dual role as producer and conduit of sound. The piece opens with mechanistic whistling sounds, evoking unmanned machines creaking in an abandoned factory. The violin enters in anxious fits and starts, with microtonal double stops and tremolos. Fragments of songs from the Manchester bands that Noon cites as influences pepper the electronics and inform the violin material, echoing a world that exists on the other side of a vast chasm.
“atrocity exhibition” for ensemble and electronics is also shaped by the legacy of Manchester pop, specifically the Joy Division song of the same name and the J.G. Ballard stories that inspired it. The instrumentation Sigman chooses splits the ensemble into three categories to mirror the diversity of creatures populating Noon’s Vurt: electronic (electric violin, electric guitar, and electric bass), mechanical (prepared piano), and animal (horn). Using sonic models from field recordings, urban sounds such as car horns, and glitchy electronic sounds evoking malfunctioning systems, Sigman builds constellations of interrelated, dynamic sound spheres. Citing the trance oriented introduction to the Joy Division song as the impetus for the piece, Sigman’s work is decidedly less static, but shares a character of non-linearity for all but its closing minute and a half, when the isolated islands of sound accumulate into something that resembles a system malfunction.
Sigman’s setting for “down the bottle” for bass flute, electronics, and sound installation is “Bottletown,” Noon’s decaying former recycling center that symbolizes the crumbling urban infrastructure in “Vurt.” Sigman builds imagery into his score by constructing the sound installation with broken glass shards on a glass pane. Throughout the work, we hear the sound of glass shattering and shimmering underneath and around insistent two note utterances in the bass flute.
“le jardin des supplices” for bass flute, violin, cello, and live electronics is inspired by a 1899 novel by French author Octave Mirbeau, literally translated as “The Torture Garden.” Mirbeau’s work was a point of departure for Noon, and here Sigman creates interdependent relationships between instrument layers (or metaphorical“victims”), with the strings merged as a pair and the bass flute mediating between them and the electronics. This is, in a sense, process music, albeit unsettlingly so — armed with Sigman’s metaphor we can hear a slow degradation of the integrity of each layer of material, as they become “progressively hollowed out by parasitic external influences.”
The final work in the VURT Cycle is “dIXsf,” scored for flute, clarinet, trumpet, electric guitar, bass guitar, percussion, piano, violin, and cello. The nine member ensemble is divided into sub-groups with shared expressive characteristics, and Sigman mixes and matches the groups to create hybrid configurations. In the opening minute of the work, glissandi manifest themselves in various guises on different instruments, connecting punctuated accents and the resonances they leave behind. When the strings enter, they introduce unstable sustained pitches and thin tremolos, and soon after one hears similar material in the clarinet and guitar. Sigman’s hybrid concept is a dynamic one, with musical ideas infecting other instrument groups, evolving due to inherent instrumental differences as well as the intentional distortion of the initial gesture. The work culminates with what Sigman describes as a dirge, an inexorable and labored march wherein the fragmented ensemble attempts (and apparently fails) to fuse together into a symbiotic organism. A coda, dedicated to David Bowie, scion for many a band in Manchester and beyond, begins with an ensemble cacophony before the piano finishes the work with a series of flourishes and towering, resonant chords.
Alexander Sigman’s affinity for science fiction shows up in his thirst for musical innovation and his fluency in creating musical analogues to thematic concepts. “VURT Cycle” is a sound world constructed from patterns of sonic interrelationships that generate unique and otherworldly results, sometimes unsettling, but always grounded in tight aesthetic underpinnings.” -Dan Lippel
—
Producers: Alexander Sigman (Tracks 1-4), Dario Giustarini (Track 5)
Mastering:The SoundLAB
Artwork and Layout: Aquiles Hadjis
Recording Information:
Track 1: The Cell, NYC, June 22, 2016 (live recording)
Track 2: Clothworkers Centenary Concert Hall, University of Leeds, UK, March 25, 2014 (live recording)
Track 3: Conrad Prebys Music Center, University of California San Diego, May 17, 2012 (studio recording)
Track 4: Daegu International Contemporary Music Festival, Daegu Music House, Korea, June 26, 2014 (live recording)
Track 5: Splendor, Amsterdam, November 15, 2019 (Dario Giustarini, recording engi- neer) (live recording)
Three Days
Three Days
Improvising trio Vaster Than Empires (Allen Otte, Erica Dicker, and Paul Schuette) formed in Cincinnati where Dicker and Schuette were pursuing doctoral work, and Otte had been a pivotal staple of the new music scene for decades as a member of Percussion Group Cincinnati. The byproduct of their collaboration has been several years of poignant, fresh improvised music informed by their collective experience in many genres of music making. This album chronicles the time they spent making music together during the summer of 2021 at Otte’s home in the Ohio Valley.
—
Erica Dicker: violin. baritone violin
Allen Otte: percussion amplified sound boards, shortwave radio
Paul Schuette: synthesizers, guitar
Recording Engineer: Paul Schuette
Mastering Engineer: Caley Monahon-Ward
Cover Art: Erica Dicker
Package Design: Paul Schuette
Special Thanks – Lauren Mabry, Dan Peck, and to Portland artist/sound sculptor Donald MacLane for the specially built brass dulcimer/hammered mbira.
Three Burials
Three Burials
On “Three Burials,” Pablo Santiago Chin merges several aspects of his creative process to create an immersive, sensual recording chronicling his music for the flute, and featuring his sister and fellow member of Chicago based ensemble Fonema Consort, flutist Dalia Chin. The centerpiece of the program is the title work itself, a three movement piece that includes movements that can be heard either in solo versions, as they open and close the recording, or in ensemble settings, as they are heard in tracks 4-6. The material in Three Burials is generated from a transcription of Peruvian indigenous flute music to the modern flute. Pablo asked Dalia to transcribe this material in a natural and non-literal way to the modern flute, and then subject it to further manipulation and distortion, resulting in the multiphonics laden material that can be heard in the opening solo flute track. In the ensemble setting of Three Burials, the insistent, almost desperate quality of the quasi vertical flute sonorities manifests itself in prismatic textures spread through the ensemble, as guitar and piano punctuate the texture with percussive snaps, plucks, and creaks, and cello and double bass offer sighing glissandi and grinding dissonances. The second movement of the ensemble work is without flute, and yet echoes the searching quality of the solo version, as it circles around poignant central pitches. In the final movement of the quintet version, near the two minute mark, we hear the guitar suddenly intoning a familiar melancholy chord progression, a quote in fact from Ravel’s famous Pavane pour une infante defunte, while the flute continues to play anguished overblown passages. It is a remarkable moment for how naturally the tonal chords fit into the gestural, non-harmonic context, but not surprising as Chin’s expressive vocabulary is in fact often romantic and elegiac, despite the contemporary materials and sound vocabulary. In the Form of a Shell for orchestra and flute soloist gives us an opportunity to hear Chin’s deft orchestrational hand, as a trajectory from dense and active to sparse and static in the flute part is reversed in the orchestra, suggesting a slow burial of the soloist by the encroaching mass of the ensemble. Inside the Shell also engages with spacialization concerns in live performance, as the orchestra is arranged in spirals around the soloist, reflecting the organization of the orchestration through the piece. Libros de Marc and Inside the Shell I and II are solo pieces both born out of the material for the larger flute and orchestra work, Inside the Shell, reasserting the internal links between the generative process that connects many of the pieces on this recording. Como la leyenda de Ixquiq was originally written for the flute duo of Claire Chase and Eric Lamb from the International Contemporary Ensemble, and echoes Chin’s interest in spacialized performance. As the register of the individual parts expands over the course of the work, the performers spread away from each other to the edges of the stage, mirroring the expansion of the pitch range in their physical proximity to each other. On “Three Burials”, we hear Pablo Santiago Chin’s rich sense of color, the depth of his interest in unique and probing collaborative processes, and a powerfully emotional musical voice that speaks through disembodied extended techniques as clearly as through quotes from the traditional repertoire. Dalia Chin’s performance is virtuosic and deeply felt throughout, making this album a special one both for its familial collaboration and for the artistic commitment it displays.
Pablo Santiago Chin’s recent works draw inspiration from the narratives of film and literature, phonetic structures from texts, and the possible dramatic implications of these sources. His music has been performed in North, Central and South America, Israel, Hong Kong and in Europe. Chin has been commissioned by Ensemble Recherche, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Ryan Muncy and Sean Patayanikorn, the Latino Music Festival of Chicago and Ensemble Dal Niente. His works have also been performed by Ostravská Banda, Donatienne Michel-Dansaq, Pierre-Stéphane Meugé, Marino Formenti, Gan Lev and Marcus Weiss. Chin is Artistic Director of Fonema Consort and teaches at Drew University in New Jersey.
Dalia Chin, Costa Rican flutist based in Chicago dedicates a large part of her artistic work to expand the possibilities and contemporary repertoire for the flute. She has worked closely with renown composers like Julio Estrada, James Dillon and Mesias Maiguashca, and has premiered works by emerging composers like Joan Arnau Pàmies, Francisco Castillo Trigueros, Amadeus Regucera and Dai Fujikura. Besides being a member of the Chicago Composers Orchestra (CCO) and the What is Noise Ensemble, Chin is a founding member of Fonema Consort. Chin has participated in important festivals in the USA and Mexico, including the Ear Taxi Festival, Frequency Festival, Latino Music Festival of Chicago, Omaha Under the Radar, Permutations Series, Visiones Sonoras and Festival Internacional Chihuahua.
—
Dalia Chin, flute (all tracks)
Walter Morales, conductor; Orquesta Sinfónica de Heredia (OSH) (track 2)
David Cubek, conductor; Chris Wild, cello; Mark Buchner, double bass; Jesse Langen, guitar; Mabel Kwan, piano (Track 4-6)
Eliza Bangert, flute (track 8)
Recorded at Experimental Sound Studio (ESS) (tracks 1, 3, 7-9), Eugene O’Neill Theater (track 2), Constellation Chicago (tracks 4-6)
Producer: Pablo Santiago Chin
Engineer: Alex Iglizian (tracks 1, 3, 7-9), Carlos “Pipo” Chavez (track 2), David Zuchowski (tracks 4-6)
Mastering: Chris Mercer
The Torres Cycle
The Torres Cycle
“Composer Wilfrido Terrazas presents a seven part album length work, The Torres Cycle, which explores ritual, indigenous tradition from his native Mexico, alternative notation, structured improvisation, spatialized live performance techniques, and an evocative instrumentation layout to explore questions of social connection and the mysterious relationship between tradition, history, and the present. A virtuoso flutist, Terrazas presents a musical language in which the power of expression frames the palette of techniques, creating a fresh and urgent soundworld.
Ritual and collective experience lie at the heart of Wlifrido Terrazas’ ambitious seven part work, The Torres Cycle. Structured around four movements invoking the four cardinal directions and three interstitial “tótems” for smaller forces, Terrazas draws on Mesoamerican conceptual traditions to examine the relationship between the absolute quality of direction and the relative nature of perception. Through a score that relies heavily on improvised elements and spatialized performance instructions, Terrazas delivers a powerful message — our understanding of a place, idea, or event is framed by where we stand in relation to it.
For the realization of the work on this recording, Terrazas took advantage of timbral diversity, highlighting different instrumental groups through the various movements. The cycle begins with Torre del Norte, performed by a brass sextet with electronics. Opening with a series of unison pitches that are subtly bent and timbrally modulated, Terrazas invites the listener immediately into a world of communion. As Torre del Norte evolves the texture becomes disjunct and parts individuated, a hive of percolating energy.
The first totem in the collection, Tótem I, Camino sobre la tierra, features oboe and percussion. The oboe glides fluidly between pitches with glissandi, bends, and grainy multi-phonics while the percussion primarily plays light bell sounds. It is patient, searching music until the texture shifts briefly to agitated, rhythmically fragmented material.
Three percussionists perform Torre del Este, an atmospheric movement highlighting wood blocks, chimes, and cymbals. Energetic gestures swirl through the trio, building on each other towards a dense midpoint before receding to the sparse texture of the opening.
Tótem II, Miro hacia el cielo is for four piccolos, including Terrazas, and evolves similarly to Torre del Norte, opening with subtle microtonal discrepancies between sustained pitches. Terrazas creates musical scenarios that increase tension through stretching and pulling at central pitches. Fluttering lines suggest agitated bird song as the music moves into more active material. A gentle, disjunct chorale follows, independent voices circling each other to produce a pulsing sound mass.
Torre del Sur is for string quartet plus double bass, and is built on a fragile scaffold of high pitched cries and whispers. Malleable, expressive lines establish a contrasting layer of activity in the middle register and propel intensification. One gets the sense we are hearing universal sentiments expressed in an extinct language, or one not yet cultivated. The movement charts two large arcs, with a second climax exploding into furious collective improvisation.
Tótem III, Estoy en el centro pairs trumpet and contrabass in an energetic duo dialogue. The movement inverts the trajectory of many of the others in the cycle, opening with active and dense material and gradually moving towards a sparser texture before becoming more active again. The alternation between different trumpet mutes and between arco and pizzicato on the bass create the illusion that there is a quartet inside the duo.
The cycle’s final movement, Torre del Oeste, features a wind quartet with Terrazas on flute, leading the movement with a rhapsodic solo that embeds short melodic fragments inside spiraling, sinewy connective material. As the other three winds enter, the composite texture takes on an undulating quality. The movement provides a cathartic close to a work which achieves cohesion from the patient unfolding of its component parts. If Terrazas’ message is that our perspective on ideas is shaped by where we stand, The Torres Cycle is a musical prescription for our limited capacity to see the big picture, a ritual path seeking collective wholeness.” –Dan Lippel
—
The Torres Collective
Wilfrido Terrazas, artistic coordinator
All music composed by Wilfrido Terrazas
Produced by Wilfrido Terrazas
Recorded by Andrew Munsey at Studios A and B, Warren Lecture Hall, UC San Diego, 2020-2021
Additional recording by Michael Butler, Filiberto Villavicencio, Sarah Belle Reid, Weston Olencki, Berk Schneider, Mattie Barbier, MB Gordy, Ryan Streber, and Alexandria Smith, 2019-2021
Mixed and mastered by Ramón del Buey at El Palacio de Asturias, Mexico City, September-October 2021
Cover art and design by Esther Gámez Rubio
Liner notes by Amy Cimini
The Threshing Floor / Plastic Disorder
The Threshing Floor / Plastic Disorder
The experimental saxophone and percussion duo scapegoat places collaboration and multi-media projects at the center of their practice. The Threshing Floor/Plastic Disorder, their most recent release, documents two significant works written for them by composers Mauricio Pauly and Santiago Díez-Fischer. Both are scored for electronics and amplified instruments, and the fabric of the music is intricately bound up in the dynamic between acoustic, electronic, and enhanced elements. scapegoat brings virtuosity to the delicate demands of this highly detailed music, which calls for instrumental command, technical expertise with respect to the live electronics, and a keen sense for balancing out all of the elements to create an ideal composite sonic result.
Mauricio Pauly’s The Threshing Floor spotlights two performers facing one another, their choreographies intimately integrated between them, their instruments and the terms of their amplification. A rough undulating centre throws offshoots into a pale ring of sustained tones projected by speakers against the outer walls. These ebb back into swarms of controlled feedback, extending the boundaries of all bodies involved.
Pauly establishes layers of activity throughout the work, with some sounds functioning as variable foreground material and others providing a more static background. Within these frames, the foregrounds and backgrounds shift and interact, sometimes forming hybrid timbres, and other times activating feedback with the other sounds present. As the work opens, a low drone pitch intermittently blooms into saxophone overtones as gravelly sounds in the percussion and electronics establish a percolating core. Two minutes in, a percussive attack signals a transition to a new section dominated by wispy gestures in the sax and on a frame drum, punctuated by static and insistent clicking in the electronics. The environment gradually become more abrasive, before the texture shifts again, now framed by sustained tones in the high register. Throughout Pauly adjusts sonic parameters and then explores them as a new ecosystem, allowing the sounds to interact and catalyze movement.
At the eight-minute mark, emerging from the airy texture from earlier, the piece becomes more angular with a repetitive, mechanistic ostinato over which Pauly builds layers of contrasting material. An oscillating, meditative drone emerges from the resonance of this activity and complex composite figures are layered, building steadily. At roughly 14:30, the foreground activity pulls back to reveal the drone, now developed as a beguiling harmonic loop. We are left with a sense of weightlessness that invites us to revisit our experience so far. Low rumbling events emerge and recede beneath this loop for the next several minutes before a landslide of sound washes in a new texture at roughly 18:30. Rapid strings of attacks, as if one were dragging a stick along several wooden slats, sustain intensity over a dense pad of sound. The texture diffuses under sounds of static and electronic glitches, before a bare high register tone closes out the final minutes of the piece. Pauly paces the formal structure of the piece beautifully, building to transitional moments by enhancing components of the prevailing texture as they instigate a shift.
The opening of Díez-Fischer’s Plastic Disorder is more instrumentally tactile, featuring unsettling textures between unstable sax multiphonics and tom-tom played with a bow and ruler modulating the head of the drum. Both instruments are again amplified, and Díez-Fischer incorporates distortion and octave effects pedals into the percussion chain, and volume pedals on both instruments, allowing for fascinating modulations of the amplified acoustic sound. In contrast to The Threshing Floor which predominantly established and developed immersive, multi-layered sonic environments, Plastic Disorder spends more time excavating discrete sonic phenomena, focusing our attention on the fragile textures established between timbres emanating from the two instruments and their respective processing. The material is often achingly melodic, despite resulting from sounds that express themselves in ambiguous combinations of pitch and noise. Just before the twelve-minute mark, Díez-Fischer establishes a searing pedal point around which whistling pitches and sax multiphonics swirl. After a brief interruption that is reminiscent of a system malfunction, the drone returns transposed an octave down, as feedback and saxophone growls become more ravenous.
The music on The Threshing Floor/Plastic Disorder, speaks to the constant evolution of the integration between acoustic and electronic elements. The conversation surrounding the relationship between technology and live performer in electro-acoustic music has shifted away from whether or not they are equal partners, in dialogue with one another, immersive or enhancing. The music scapegoat presents has been designed from the outset with the electronic elements as an inextricable component of the ensemble texture. By leaning on the edges of instrumental sound and then using processing to modulate those sounds, Pauly and Díez-Fischer have crafted a sonic vocabulary that precedes these aesthetic questions about the relationship between two distinct elements of the music — the composite of acoustic, amplified, and electronically processed sound is the unique compound instrument being written for and the resulting material is its natural expression.
—
scapegoat (CAN/FR) is:
Joshua Hyde, saxophone
Noam Bierstone, percussion
Recorded by Luca Piovesan
Blowout Studios, Treviso, Italy, February 2018
Produced by Murat Çolak, Mauricio Pauly, Santiago Díez-Fischer
Mixed by Murat Çolak
Mastered by Richard Scott
Photography by Regina Stelzer
Artwork by Renee Gladman
Art Design by Mauricio Quirós and Curtis Ho
The Recombinant Trilogy
The Recombinant Trilogy
Pioneering composer George Lewis releases “The Recombinant Trilogy,” an album consisting of three works for solo instrument and electronics that use interactive digital delays, spatialization and timbre transformation to transform the acoustic sounds of the instrument into multiple digitally created sonic personalities that follow diverse yet intersecting spatial trajectories. Featuring virtuosic soloists flutist Claire Chase, cellist Seth Parker Woods, and bassoonist Dana Jessen, doppelgängers are created that blur the boundaries between original and copy, while shrouding their origin in processes of repetition.
—
Emergent was recorded in Accord, New York on 11/10/2020, engineered by Claire Chase; electronics performance and post-production by Levy Lorenzo
Not Alone was recorded at University of Huddersfield, UK on 7/14/2016, engineered by Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, with assistants Frederic Dufeu, Dave Jones and Sebastien Lavoie; electronics performed by Seth Parker Woods, original mixing and mastering by Christopher Botta at Staple Chest Audio, Brooklyn, NY
Seismologic was recorded at Clonick Hall, Oberlin Ohio on 3/13/2019, engineered by Andrew Tripp; electronics performed by Eli Stine, and mixed by Andrew Tripp
Mastering: Ryan Streber, oktavenaudio.com
Design and layout: Marc Wolf
Software by Damon Holzborn
This project was made possible through generous support from the Edwin H. Case Chair in American Music, Columbia University
The recording of Seismologic was supported by a Grant-in-Aid from Oberlin College
Stereotaxi
Stereotaxi
“Pianist and composer Zack Clarke and cellist Chris Irvine have been building a singular improvisational vocabulary together for over a decade. On Stereotaxi the two bring their intuitive symbiosis to several spontaneous compositions, highlighting the breadth and versatility that flourishes within the growing so-called chamber jazz idiom.
The plethora of sub-genres of improvised music does very little to reinforce what is a fundamental quality of the actual practice of improvising with others — that is, that the shared vocabulary and sensibility between the musicians is a primary factor that shapes the music. Pianist Zack Clarke and cellist Chris Irvine’s Stereotaxi chronicles their symbiotic creations, drawing on a broad palette of stylistic references. One might fold this album into the growing “chamber jazz” category, but that could dilute the rich nuances contained within. A listener can appreciate this music on multiple levels, immersing one’s ears in the specifics of the language the duo occupies at any one moment, or noting their deft skill in crafting multi-layered, mutually supportive frameworks on a dime. Ultimately, what we hear is two musicians who know each other’s artistry intimately, and bring that deep familiarity to spontaneous compositions that arrive at rewarding destinations.
One notable feature of this album is the length of the tracks; in the free improvised world, many performances are set length, with elided transitions between textural sections that connect into larger scale works. Clarke and Irvine choose the opposite approach, and with all but one of the improvisations featured here clocking in under six minutes (and several closer to two or three), the opportunity arises for listener and player alike to understand the music as unfolding in more tightly controlled structures. Within these shorter durations, motivic or textural ideas can be more deliberately managed, creating music that shares a lot with the genre of the character piece.
The album opens with a flurry of energy in “Gliding Through” as both instruments play furtive, tremolando gestures and arpeggiations. Taut, micro-motives emerge before ricochet articulations in the cello diffuse the rhythmic incision. After an intro which places the instruments in their own timbral worlds, the ironically named “Sit Still” evolves through darting responsorial bursts, with each player recalling enough of the other’s material to create cohesion but not too much to bog it down with pat imitation. An internal pizzicato section returns to the opening texture and creates a three part structure.
The duo’s attraction to small forms is further underscored in “6 Miniatures” and “4 Short Pieces”, three and two minute improvisations respectively that include several brief crystalline inventions. The pair writes, “we would talk about the similarities between Bach and Webern, wondering if they would be friends.” The marriage between a compressed reference to counterpoint in the fifth miniature of “6 Miniatures” and the brevity of each miniature suggests that they would get along quite well.
“Fragments of Sunrise” is the first of several tracks that place itself in an quasi-Impressionist, late Romantic aesthetic frame. Clarke and Irvine’s intuitive absorption of the syntax of this music is apparent. That context allows them to insert nuanced details, such as the staccato chords Clarke inserts that gradually infiltrate Irvine’s playing, or Irvine’s subtle flirting with microtonal expressive devices. Those microtones show up briefly in “Sorrow Song” as it leans into a predominantly late Romantic framework, ending with a question mark on an unresolved fifth of an authentic cadence. “Waking in Water” is a rhapsodic fantasy, with tolling keyboard oscillations and a poignant cello melody that floats through lush, tonal harmonies while taking unexpected turns.
Clarke and Irvine’s debt to jazz appears in unexpected guises. In the middle section of “Confrontation,” Clarke settles into a slow swing feel underneath a bristling cello line of ponticello harmonic glissandi. “Stride Me to the Moon” is more overt, and tongue in cheek, in its connection to the tradition of improvising on American popular song themes, as Clarke lightly alludes to stride techniques on the piano in a lumbering tempo, and Irvine extracts soulful expression from vibrating pizzicato, ethereal overtones, and winding melodic passages.
The final track, “Dreams of Weight,” is the album’s longest, and an opportunity to hear the duo stretch out over a longer temporal canvas. Irvine plays the opening move with a sly gesture including a short-long-short motive that is passed between the two. He pivots soon thereafter to a blues-inflected melody, accompanied by watery chords in the piano. Clarke finds a natural pedal point which ushers in a quasi-modal, Phrygian Dominant-inflected stasis, over which Irvine pushes and pulls with microtonal shadings and poignant double stops. Later, Clarke uses the same pedal point for cascading Messiaen-esque chords before Irvine steps into the fore for a long lined, elegiac rhapsody. The track retains a meditative intensity throughout, a thoughtful final offering in an album that alternates skillfully between jump-cut rates of change and slowly evolving textures.
Beyond the aesthetic frames that Clarke and Irvine navigate smoothly lies the most important quality of their successful collaboration. As material shifts and contexts evolve, the two constantly retain a bird’s eye view of how to balance foreground and background, imitation and invention, structural return and new territory. Shared vocabulary is key, but this meta awareness of how to shape a spontaneously unfolding composition is what makes this collection so effective.” –Dan Lippel
—
Recorded at Samurai Hotel Astoria, NY by David Stoller on December 6, 2021
Mixed and mastered by Dave Darlington at Base Hit Studios, New York, NY
Produced by Zack Clarke
Design by Michael Clarke
Simulacra
Simulacra
“How does this singularity for which I am affectionate come to be expressed in what can only be simulated?” might be how Colin Hinton’s Simulacra approaches its realization. Simulation is captured singularity. Recording is one such procedure of capture. The singularity of performance transduced, thereby modulated, into simulacra-in-wav format. Simulacra the record convokes in its capture an affection for the mentors, community, and the lineages within which Hinton situates himself. Singularity is that which is inexpressible, yet yearns to be expressed. It empowers affection and in-so-doing generates simulacra. It is this singularity driven affection from which this Simulacra emerges, and to which it necessarily returns.
“The album contains pieces composed with specific musicians/composers in mind, the word seemed fitting,” explains Hinton. The mystic chord as foundation to “Synesthopy” adheres not just to his affection for Alexander Scriabin but undoubtedly also for his teacher Eric Wubbels who himself shares affection for the Russian quasi-theosophist. A similar sentiment follows for the adherence of both Morton Feldman-like and Tyshawn Sorey-like elements to the piece “Breath”. Sorey, himself a Feldman enthusiast, is a vital friend and mentor to Hinton both currently and throughout his developmental years in New York. Ingrid Laubrock, Hinton’s former teacher, Muhal Richard Abrams, progenitor of the AACM, and polyvalent instrumentalist/composer Anthony Braxton all also participate in the conflux/capture.
Engineered by Aaron Nevezie and Nolan Thies at The Bunker Studio in Brooklyn, edited by close friend and guitarist, Edward Gavitt, mixed by neighbor and collaborator Eivind Opsvik, and mastered by Brent Lambert, Hinton’s compositions adhere in recording through captured, singular, performative modulation. They are forged through his singular community, an already-modulating performance-in-process (instrumental personnel all also former/current Brooklynites: Anna Webber, Yuma Uesaka, Shawn Lovato, Edward Gavitt).
Because recording is captured singularity, to begin to describe it reduces its intense complexity to a limited combinatoriality. The singularity of listening experience here crystallized is what allows the recording-simulation to return to singularity. What then of simulation? Simulacra is an unfolding of such singularities contextualized and expressed by their convergence into recording. “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”; simulation is the most genuine expression of affection.
The biblical, Ecclesiastical simulacrum does not ascribe primacy to either truth or simulation, but to truth in affection: love. They are concomitant, adhering to their own allegories. In paying homage to those for whom he is affectionate, Hinton expresses this truth and conjures into being allegories through which others might participate in that truth/love. What is then evoked upon listening is just this. Affection and love. Experiential adhesive and world-glue. Everything beyond simulation.” -Robert Grieve August 17, 2019
—
Anna Webber: tenor saxophone, flute, bass flute; Yuma Uesaka, tenor saxophone, clarinet, bass clarinet, contralto clarinet
Edward Gavitt: electric and acoustic guitars; Shawn Lovato, bass
Colin Hinton: drums, percussion, glockenspiel, gongs
Engineered by Aaron Nevezie and Nolan Thies at The Bunker Studio in Brooklyn on September 11th, 2018
Edited by Edward Gavitt in November 2018
Mixed by Eivind Opsvik at Greenwood Underground in December 2018 – February 2019
Mastered by Brent Lambert at Kitchen Mastering in March – April 2019
Photography by Edward Gavitt and Gaya Feldheim-Schorr
Artwork by Takaaki Yagi
Design by Marc Wolf
Special thank you to Anna, Yuma, Ed, and Shawn. Your support and enthusiasm throughout this project mean so much to me.
Colin would like to thank Eivind, Ingrid, Tyshawn, Eric, Taylor, Dan, Rob, Gaya, Andrea, Brian Adler, New Focus Recordings, The Bunker Studio, Kitchen Mastering, Clandestine, and Snake and Cornelia.
Sextet
Sextet
Saxophonist/Clarinetist/Composer Ken Thomson has been an active member of the New York freelance scene for nearly two decades, as a performing member of the Bang on a Can All Stars and Asphalt Orchestra, among several others. Also an accomplished bandleader, Thomson releases his newest Sextet recording featuring ambitious, rhythmically incisive music (including an arrangement of Ligeti’s Passacaglia Ungherese) that flows seamlessly between elaborate contrapuntal textures, edge of your seat unison passages, and blistering improvisations from a first rate band of colleagues.
—
Ken Thomson: alto saxophone and compositions
Anna Webber: tenor saxophone
Russ Johnson: trumpet
Alan Ferber: trombone
Adam Armstrong: bass
Daniel Dor: drums
Produced by Ken Thomson
Recorded by Damon Whittemore and Todd Whitelock at Flux Studios, NYC, January 11-12 2017
Mixed and Mastered by Damon Whittemore at Valvetone Studios, NYC, June and September, 2017
Paintings and package design by Jason Das
Roots
Roots
“Composers Heather Stebbins and Christopher Chandler have powerfully unique voices, but they share a penchant for focusing on the granular components of sound and building larger structural arcs from this enhanced perspective. On this co-release of their works featuring the Switch Ensemble, we hear music for soloists and ensembles with electronics that revels in tactile features of instrumental and electronic sound and in complex, asymmetrical musical mechanisms.
Chandler’s these old roots for amplified bass drum and fixed media opens the program, and relies heavily on software he designed to manipulate percussive sounds into multiple permutations. Chandler focused on delicate sounds on the bass drum (subverting the expectation that we would hear torrential low percussion strikes). The bass drum and the electronics seem to exhale and inhale as one organism, passing through a middle section that features undulating pitch material in the electronics before settling on a chorus of friction sounds for the work’s close.
Stebbins’ Ursa Major for saxophone, percussion, piano, and electronics picks up where these old roots left off, opening with finely grained non pitched sounds. Most of the instrumental material of the first half of the piece obscures natural sound production — an accumulating gong roll fills the space with an overtone laden haze, shrouded multiphonic sustains on saxophone conjure a voice that has been muffled. When we hear the piano emerge with arpeggiated figures, it has been prepared, lending it a faint quality of a quiet gamelan.
Chandler’s Strata was written in close collaboration with members of Switch, using asynchronous recording sessions and telematic improvisations. Like a sculptor, Chandler then chiseled away at the recorded material to reveal this elemental work, a meditation of layers of sustained sonorities and the way they interact with one another.
Stebbins’ Among Arrows for flute, clarinet, violin, and cello, is the sole multi-movement work on the album, containing two main movements, or “arrows”, separated by an interlude, or “parenthesis.” “Arrow I” has an air of ritual to it, with the four instrumentalists playing plaintive figures that embellish a core sonority, while the electronics explore a series of scraping and rattling sounds. “A Parenthesis” features a repeated chordal sonority, played like a kind of mantra, around which gentle accents and fragile sonorities expand the harmonic and gestural implications outward. “Arrow II” features wavering sustained tones, closely spaced between the instrument to emphasize subtle timbral sand pitch discrepancies that emerge between them. At the end of the movement, we hear the material from “A Parenthesis” return, a lilting farewell march.
Chandler’s still life, for bass flute, bass clarinet, violin, and cello, is shaped by generative software he designed that produces unique combinations of pre-recorded material of the four instruments for each new performance. The notation for the instrumentalists is similarly variable, specifying the material but not necessarily the order in which it is heard, guaranteeing that the piece will never be the same twice. Perhaps even more than these roots, the boundary between live performer and electronics is blurred. In keeping with the meta-dialogue that underlies the curation of this album, still life shares the quiet, ritualistic intensity of Stebbins’ Among Arrows.
Like the opening track, the closing piece on the recording is an electro-acoustic work for a soloist — Stebbins’ Sub Rosa for bass clarinet and electronics. The granularity of these old roots has also returned, as Stebbins excavates the hidden stacks of a wondrous library of sounds on bass clarinet. As with the other pieces on the album, the drama and tension derives from an intense introversion inherent in the careful attention to detail in sound production and exploration. For both Stebbins and Chandler, the invitation to a profound musical experience lies in leaning in closer, examining more carefully, and opening up assumptions about instrumental sound and the nature of their interface with electronics. The musicians of the Switch Ensemble inhabit this rarefied music beautifully, creating a recorded document of these works that breathes with the animated wonder that the composers have injected into their conception.” -Dan Lippel
—
Producer and Mixing:
Tracks 1, 3, 7: Christopher Chandler
Tracks 2, 4, 5, 6 & 8: Heather Stebbins
Recording Engineers:
Tracks 1-6: Ryan Streber
Track 7: Christopher Chandler
Track 8: Oliver Noack & Frank Schmidt
Recording Locations:
Tracks 1-6: Oktaven Audio, Mount Vernon, New York, October 8-9, 2021
Track 7: Emerson Auditorium, Union College, Schenectady, New York, May 24, 2022
Track 8: Temple Studio GbR, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, October 26, 2021
Mastering:
Edward Hamel at Identity Mastering
Tracks 2, 4, 5, 6, and 8 include sounds from the wonderful and unusual sound libraries by Tim Prebble at Hiss and a Roar. Track 6 includes sounds from the Experimental Flute Soundpack Vol. 1 by Rachel Beetz
Cover photo: Matt Eich
Design: Marc Wolf
Real Loud
Real Loud
“The New York–based antiphonal chamber metal band Real Loud tackles four premieres for mirrored electric basses, electric guitars, and drum sets that draw on influences from progressive metal and spatial music. The driving textures and multi-dimensional expressive worlds of Pascal Le Boeuf, Paul Kerekes, Brendon Randall-Myers, and Jenny Beck shine light on an aesthetic confluence that has existed in the new music community for decades, stemming from artists like Louis Andriessen, Michael Gordon, Joan La Barbara, Maryanne Amacher, Elliott Sharp, and Glenn Branca.
Real Loud opens with Pascal Le Boeuf’s Forbidden Subjects, a tour de force of mixed meters, angular accents, and pulsing grooves inspired by the extreme metal band Meshuggah and dedicated to Louis Andriessen who mentored Le Boeuf from 2015-16. The title refers to three subjects Andriessen discussed as low profile feelings that are not good for art: sex, violence, and horror. A steady repeated note ostinato passed between the low registers of bass and guitar grows out of an initial smear of bends and a descending tremolo glissando. Accented hits begin to punctuate this rhythmic grid before snaking lines evolve from there. Le Boeuf sets up compound scalar lines between left and right subsets of the band, with one finishing the other’s musical idea, deftly truncating figures to distort the meter and drive the texture forward. Modular ideas are interchanged in fast jump cut style, with a quintuplet unison riff serving a transitional and structural function. The relentless density is momentarily suspended in the middle of the work as pulsing improvised textures in the guitars and basses are ritualistically detuned down and then up again. The quintuplet riff returns, growing into a drum battle between Mark Utley and Clara Warnaar (of Infinity Shred) before a jangly maelstrom emerges and pushes towards an ecstatic climax.
Paul Kerekes’ Codependence explores a more ethereal sound world, featuring interlocking lines of harmonics and over-ringing chords above flourishes in the drums and cymbals. Watery phrases start in the high register and spill down, settling momentarily before a new phrase begins. In the middle section, the texture becomes more continuous as arpeggios flow in and out of the two guitars, anchored by repeated figures in the basses. After the more active section dissipates, the fluid material from the opening returns before the piece ends with gently hocketing chords.
Brendon Randall-Myers (whose dynamics of vanishing bodies for electric guitar quartet was released in the fall of 2020 on New Focus) follows with the gnarly Double Double. A groove of repeated notes in a fast triple meter is established from the opening before it opens up into a tangled web of interlocking lines. Randall-Myers gradually widens the initially compressed register as high accented notes dart out of the spidery passagework. Throughout, the ensemble plays in a similar phrase contour without being in rhythmic unison, creating intricate, tight machines of sound. After a series of syncopated scale fragments broken up by tolling harmonics, the group intones deep, low register chords, harbingers of doom. The return of the insistent repeated notes from the opening is heard here in a more expansive context, with angular, percolating figures dancing between the instrumental parts. The pitch register compresses down to a dense power chord cluster as the piece comes to a powerful end.
The album closes with its most experimental music, Go in Secret by Jenny Beck. Mysterious harmonics, an enveloping windscape sound, and a pad of drones evolve in the work’s opening minutes. Slowly ascending lines played with a slide surface in the guitars while the drummers play foreboding fragments on the toms. Suddenly, massive chords splash across the mix while unsettling found sounds are heard close and upfront. Disembodied voices, performed by Beck herself, spin a distorted, chantlike melody. Delicate, unpitched crackling sounds end the work, a stark close for an album largely devoted to a maximalist soundscape. The inclusion of Beck’s piece in this program really broadens the offerings with its textural and quasi-theatrical sophistication.
Real Loud demonstrates its virtuosity not just in the powerful onslaught of grooves and rapid fire rhythmic corners in the Le Boeuf and Randall-Myers works, but also in establishing a sheen to the ensemble sound in the Kerekes and projecting a spatialized timbral soundscape in the Beck. This is an album that truly straddles several genres, appealing to devotees of each, uncovering a throughline of artistic community.” –Dan Lippel
—
Tristan Kasten-Krause, bass guitar
James Moore, electric guitar
Brendon Randall-Myers, electric guitar
Evan Runyon, bass guitar
Mark Sauer-Utley, drums & percussion
Clara Warnaar, drums & percussion
Recorded by Tim O’Sullivan at Greenpoint Recording Collective (Brooklyn NY), April 3-7, 2017
Mixed by Tim O’Sullivan (Tracks 2-4) at Barefoot Recording (Los Angeles CA) and Dave Darlington (Track 1) at Bass Hit Studios (New York NY)
Mastered by Ian Sefchick (Tracks 2-4) at Capitol Studios (Los Angeles CA) and Dave Darlington (Track 1) at Bass Hit Studios (New York NY)
Produced by Tristan Kasten-Krause, Evan Runyon, Pascal Le Boeuf (Track 1) and Brendon Randall-Myers (Track 3)
Plays Well With Others
Plays Well With Others
“On their third release with New Focus, loadbang (Jeff Gavett, baritone; Andrew Kozar, trumpet; William Lang, trombone; Adrian Sandi, clarinet) reaches beyond their idiosyncratic quartet instrumentation to collaborate with a string ensemble. loadbang has cultivated a kind of symbiotic instrumental organism, with the three winds breathing and uttering with Gavett’s oratorical baritone. The approaches to the extended ensemble on this recording that composers Taylor Brook, Reiko Füting, Paula Matthusen, Heather Stebbins, Scott Wollschleger, and Eve Beglarian take are varied and fascinating, keeping the four headed creature that is the core of loadbang at the center while using the strings to provide a sonic environment, commentary, and an expanded sound palette.
Plays Well With Others opens with Taylor Brook’s Tarantism in which he sets 16th and 17th century Italian texts on curing the ills resulting from a tarantula bite (this practice was the origin of the tarantella). Brook establishes loadbang as the musician/doctor, with Gavett providing a mix of dramatic narrative context, specific procedural instructions for treatment, and incantations. Meanwhile the strings are assigned the role of the afflicted party. We hear waves of pain and disorientation in dense dissonant string harmonies, the frenzy of ritualistic dancing in cathartic tutti gestures, and the weariness of post-treatment in undulating, creaking harmonics in the work’s final passage.
On Riven, Heather Stebbins weaves together discarded material from past projects, creating something new and cohesive. Stebbins integrates electronics into the wide ranging timbral texture in such a way that the boundary between man-made and computer generated is blurry. The work opens with a series of punctuated exhalations from which a captivating series of sounds from the core quartet spills out before being reinforced by the strings. If Brook established a dichotomy between the four voices in loadbang and the strings to serve a narrative purpose, Stebbins strives to expand the hybrid instrument to include the new sounds within one dynamic organism. Riven journeys through fragile, fricative sounds, poignant sighs in the strings, and tightly woven electro-acoustic mechanisms.
In her You See Where This is Going, Eve Beglarian sets a text by Brendan Constantine that investigates the dissonance between the names of things and their essence. Percolating pizzicati in the strings set up chordal sonorities in the winds to close the brief phrases, while Gavett sings melismatic lines. As the piece evolves, those roles reverse, with more sustained harmonies in the strings and the loadbang winds rearticulating the final notes of their gestures as if they are stuttering. The work closes with a more elegiac passage, as the ensemble supports Gavett’s mysterious delivery of Constantine’s final lines: “you imagine hiding when the world finds out you’re not who you’ve said.”
Reiko Füting’s music integrates quotation, evocative non-pitched sounds, and visceral gestures into a texture that develops material through repetition with variation. The title of mo(nu)ment for C/palimpsest refers to sculptures by American artist Dan Flavin, while the whispered texts consist of three fragments: “Je suis,” “Ich bin,” and “I am.” The piece was written in reaction to the attack on the Charlie Hebdo publication in 2015. A gradually accumulating introductory texture grows from rhythmic whispers into multi-timbral mechanisms, as Füting uses the strings to provide coloristic harmonic support and imitative gestural material. The subtle evolution of each gesture through repeated cells creates a meditative atmosphere, a chance to contemplate the many angles of “I am.”
Scott Wollschleger’s CVS is also a meditation, this time on the way in which the commercial forum for disseminating information can flatten divergent meaning. Concepts like “CVS,” “There’s been a terrorist attack,” and “Cool graphics,” can consequently occupy the same space in our minds. Gavett intones “CVS” as a kind of mantra, albeit a palliative one, turning the three letters around and mining them for multiple shades of tone by manipulating the emphasis and vocal inflection. While the words “CVS” and “There’s been a terrorist attack” seem to occupy a similar disembodied expressive space, it is the phrase “Cool graphics” that receives the grandeur of majestic octaves in the ensemble.
The final work on the album, Paula Matthusen’s Such is Now the Necessity, takes full advantage of the expanded sonorous potential of the loadbang plus strings format. Layered, overlapping lines create expansive harmonies evocative of Renaissance polyphony heard in a church whose long reverb tail creates unexpected verticalities. Midway through the work, the wind articulations shorten into passages of enlivened repeated notes and the strings play flowing passagework, creating a heroic antiphonal dialogue that surrounds Gavett’s soaring vocal line.” -Dan Lippel
—
Ryan Streber, recording engineer and producer
Alex Eckman-Lawn, album art and design
All works recorded at Oktaven Audio in Mt. Vernon, NY on February 28, 2020 and October 28-30, 2021
Jeff Gavett, baritone
Andrew Kozar, trumpet
William Lang, trombone
Adrian Sandi, clarinet
Eduardo Leandro, conductor
Chris Otto, violin concertmaster
Erica Dicker, violin
Conrad Harris, violin
Lauren Cauley Kalal, violin
Andie Tanning, violin
Teagan Farran, violin
Hannah Levinson, viola
Carrie Frey, viola
Leah Asher, viola
Mariel Roberts, cello
Alan Richardson, cello
Evan Runyon, bass
Steve Beck (track 5 only)
Patchwork
Patchwork
Patchwork (Noa Even, saxophones and Stephen Klunk, drum set) releases its dynamic debut album featuring works written for them by Erin Rogers, Eric Wubbels, Dan Tramte, Osnat Netzer, and Hong-Da Chin. Influenced by the worlds of free jazz, metal, progressive rock, and the avant garde, Patchwork’s commitment to stylistic hybridity is matched by their fidelity to the score.
—
All tracks were recorded March 25-27, 2019 Stone Soup Recording Studios in Maumee, OH
Recording Engineer: Mark Bunce
Producers: Mark Bunce, Noa Even, & Stephen Klunk
Album design: Isaac Klunk
Partial Knowledge
Partial Knowledge
“Composer Adam Mirza’s first solo portrait album, Partial Knowledge, features chamber works written between 2006 and 2022, in performances by loadbang, Unheard-of//Ensemble, Mivos Quartet, Bent Frequency Duo Project, Amorsima Trio, Alice Teyssier, Josh Modney, Cory Smythe, and Olivia De Prato. In these pieces, Mirza explores the ways in which chamber works are reflective of the collective merging of individual perspectives, informed by their role in the whole, but in other ways shaped by their unique perspective. To further facilitate this paradigm, Mirza employs unsynchronized parts, removing form as an imposed, external force, and instead allowing it to unfold as a circumstantial manifestation of how the individual parts are executed. In some pieces, Mirza includes live electronics, field recordings, and spoken text as other elements that complicate and enrich the real time dialogue that occurs between various parameters in the music.
The first piece on the album is a setting of poems and prose of the American experimental poet Larry Eigner. Mirza describes Reading: (A Mish Mash)/For a Man/I Will Never, as a “city-like collage of poetry and experimental music.” It does take on the quality of an avant-garde spoken word performance with music; invariably the instrumental music communicates within a context of word-painting whether or not the specific simultaneities are intended. And yet, in Mirza’s assemblage of individual parts, proceeding at different speeds, he combines elements that are unified by a common expressive gestalt even in the passages where the moment to moment coordination is not fully prescribed. So the result, with the theatrical presentation resulting from the text, is a carefully curated work that possesses many local moments of serendipity despite strategically avoiding their explicit dictation.
Triangles was written for the International Contemporary Ensemble in 2012. In the compositional process Mirza focused on the characteristics of the individual instruments for which he was writing. While during most of the piece the players are unsynchronized, they do come together in the same timeline at key moments, giving the work structural pillars to rest upon. The violin and flute parts rely heavily on a fragile, gestural vocabulary of refined noise balanced with emerging pitch, while the piano plays liquid arpeggios, repeated notes, and stark, accented chords.
Growth for clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and live electronics is inspired by the city of Atlanta, and more specifically the composer’s experience growing up there only to return as an adult and a professional. Mirza captures the relentless speed of this center of the “New South” with a jump-cut collage approach to material, generated by the four performers armed with MIDI controllers that trigger live electronics. Taking the personification of the performer to another level, Mirza pits the members of the quartet against each other in a kind of futuristic Darwinist game, empowering them with the ability to process each other’s sound. Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport makes a series of cameos, with the sounds of landing planes symbolizing a fast-paced environment in which the four protagonists play out individual destinies.
The solo violin work Time Patterns and the string quartet QXTR are closely related, the latter being an extrapolation of the former across four independent parts. In Time Patterns, the solo violin score uses graphic notation in two staves (one for each hand) to chart evolving trajectories of different physical parameters of performance, including bow pressure, finger position, number of note-events per second, and the selection of which string is being played. Through the independent unfoldings of these “patterns” of performance, Mirza was interested in circumventing the strictures of traditional rhythmic and pitch material, instead endeavoring to facilitate a structured improvisation performance that found its way into the sounds “between the notes.” The result is a piece of focused intensity that is driven forward by the realization of fast changing sonic elements, as opposed to their execution in a fixed timeline. QXTR expands this notational strategy to the four players in a quartet. Here, in addition to the individual gestural interpretation of multi-layered graphic instructions, each player proceeds independently and desynchronized from the others. The resulting composite achieves its homogeneity from a similar vocabulary of sounds and its heterogeneity from the freedom afforded the players in their chosen pace.
Spatial considerations figured prominently in the conception behind Cracks, written for the Bent Frequency Duo Project. In the premiere, and by design, the two performers were positioned antiphonally in the hall on opposite balconies. For subsequent performances in less resonant spaces, Mirza created a fixed media electronic part that evoked sounds of moving within a space, such as the creaking or groaning of floor boards. Slithering saxophone runs and shimmering percussion textures come together for punctuated arrivals before retreating to their respective corners.
Shared, written for the Amorsima Trio, is a deconstruction of different kinds of chamber music behaviors. Mirza creates interactive zones that highlight various ways that instruments (and instrumentalists) interact with each other. We hear imitation, continuity, discontinuity, complementary textures, and textures in opposition. By focusing on the manner of play instead of the material, Mirza calls our attention to fascinating depth and variety intrinsic to a time-tested string trio instrumentation.
Adam Mirza’s curiosity as a composer shines through each one of his pieces in this collection. He is an artist who is invested in digging deeper, beyond an expected template, to discover new possibilities that reveal something about the way performances take on a life of their own and the way in which we as listeners are participants in the creative experience. Each work, in its own way, challenges norms of notation and performance practice, but nevertheless preserves a cohesive quality. Moreover, by taking an individual approach to conceptualizing each piece, Mirza invites us to listen in multiple ways, both to the resultant work as well as the unfolding process as it occurs.” -Dan Lippel
—
Reading: (A Mish-Mash) / For a Man / I Will Never recorded at Futura Productions, Boston, MA, May 16, 2023
Recording engineer: John Weston
Triangles recorded at Oktaven Audio, Mount Vernon, NY, May 22, 2022
Recording engineer: Ryan Streber
Growth recorded at Skillman Music, Brooklyn, NY, February 18, 2023
Recording engineer: Wei Wang
QXTR recorded at Fieldnotes Studio, Brooklyn, NY, May 19, 2022
Recording Engineer: Mike Tierney
Cracks recorded at Emory University Performing Arts Studio, Atlanta, GA, December 12, 2022 Shared recorded at Texas Woman’s University Margo Jones Performance Hall, November 26, 2023
Time Patterns recorded at Emory University Performing Arts Studio, Atlanta, GA, January 31, 2022
Recording engineer: Adam Mirza
Editing and mixing: Adam Mirza
Mastering: Ryan Streber
Liner Notes: Adam Mirza
Proofreading and Editing: Akiva Zamcheck
Cover image: Jazmin Quaynor (Unsplash)
Design, layout & typography: Marc Wolf
Pareidolia
Pareidolia
“Eren Gümrükçüoglu’s compositional world fuses unique timbres with gestural instrumental writing to craft a kind of abstract sonic cinema. There is a symphonic quality to many of these works despite their scoring for ensembles seven players and smaller, with orchestration and color occupying an essential role in Gümrükçüoglu’s writing. Equally influential is Gümrükçüoglu’s background in modern jazz, which presents itself not so much in full garb, but obliquely, in refracted form, coloring the rhythmic and harmonic material at pivotal moments and shaping his process for generating material.
The album opens with Pandemonium for fixed media electronic sounds that are sourced from a recording Gümrükçüoglu made of the Duke University music department elevator, where he did his PhD work. Gümrükçüoglu establishes a three dimensional soundscape, using spatialized sweeps and timbral events to conjure a mechanized drama of timbral relationships. Discrete pitch takes a secondary role to register, sound color, and contour as we hear an audio snapshot that is reminiscent of a dystopian, futuristic factory environment. For this work, Pareidolia, and Asansör Asimptotu, Gümrükçüoglu designed an improvising computer program, providing sound files and setting parameters, and then selected and assembled materials from the results to create the electronics that we hear on the final track.
Pareidolia, for string quartet, clarinet/tenor saxophone, percussion/drum set, piano/synthesizer, and fixed media (drawn from the same elevator recording) shares Pandemonium’s charged, kinetic rhythmic interplay, exploring various permutations of pairings between instruments and electronics. Urgent, reflex driven rhythms ricochet through the ensemble. Disembodied sustains contain hauntingly complex multiphonics and eerie clusters. Occasionally the texture coagulates into extended passages of rhythmic regularity anchored by the drum set, such as the simmering groove at the five minute mark, the insistent pointillistic passage at 9:30, the furious moto perpetuo that comes into focus at 16:45, or the climactic material at 21:15 that leads to a scrambling, syncopated texture. Duos between piano and electronics and saxophone and electronics provide structural contrast, and focus the listener’s attention more immediately on the expressive quality of Gümrükçüoglu’s electronic palette. While the saxophone part includes improvisation on the materials of the piece, the other parts are through composed but retain an improvisatory quality, highlighting Gümrükçüoglu’s deft ability to compose material that sounds nevertheless spontaneous. Pareidolia ends with undulating swells in the strings, as the saxophone floats over the top with unstable multiphonics and gravelly figuration.
The two string quartet alone works included on the album, both performed by the Mivos String Quartet, highlight Gümrükçüoglu’s ability to tease longer lines from fragmentary material as well as the influence of Turkish makams. Bozkir, which means “steppes,” opens with intense, emerging swells swirling around a central pitch, before settling into an off-balance groove of hocketed pointillistic attacks that circle through the quartet. A distorted cantus firmus emerges from the resultant arrival pitches. Near the work’s mid-point the forward energy pauses to explore a more static texture of ethereal sustained tones and tremolos. When we finally hear an extended, non-truncated ensemble melody emerge towards the end of the piece, it is heard shrouded in closely spaced clusters. Xanthos is awash in colorful microtonal relationships, painting the poignant sighs and kinesthetic swoops in the instrumental writing with shades of flavor. An extended pizzicato passage unfolds like a charming pas de deux (or perhaps de quatre), the four instruments shadowing each other’s attacks to form a percolating emerging melody.
Ordinary Things features a fixed media part including excerpts of speeches given by the authoritarian leader of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The ensemble of clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, percussion, violin, and double bass shadows the cadence of the spoken recording, with the group functioning as a sort of sardonic Greek chorus, egging on and mocking the impassioned rhetoric. A reflective instrumental interlude in the middle of the piece seems to hint at the cadence of political march music, with slow siren sounds winding through the texture. Despite the satirical framing of Erdoğan as a bombastic megalomaniac, the expressive impact of Ordinary Things is ominous — biting humor, unfortunately, will not be enough to transform this dark trend in our global politics.
Like Bozkir, Lattice Scattering for flute, piano, and fixed media develops its compositional argument with urgent, frenetic rhythmic activity. It is constructed as a trio between the two acoustic instruments and the electronics, where the electronic sounds lend a timbral multi-dimensionality to the texture. Dense fields of sound across registers create a counterpoint of simultaneous activity.
On the final electronics alone track on the album, Asansör Asimptotu, sounds careen like pistons firing through the spatialized stereo field. A disjunct groove evolves with glitches and starts, gradually traveling through a series of shifting environments. Gümrükçüoglu subjects the material to successive layers of distortion and transformation, nearly obscuring its identity entirely before the opening idea seems to reemerge briefly for the close of the piece.” –Dan Lippel
—
All music composed by Eren Gümrükçüoğlu (ASCAP), published by BabelScores, Paris
Performers:
JACK Quartet (tracks 1 and 2)
Conrad Tao (tracks 1 and 2)
Zulfugar Baghirov (tracks 1 and 2)
Thom Monks (tracks 1 and 2)
Mivos Quartet (tracks 3 and 6)
Deviant Septet (track 4)
Ensemble Suono Giallo (track 5)
Recording Engineers: Eren Gümrükçüoğlu (tracks 1, 3, 7), Rick Nelson (tracks 2, 4, 6), David Giacchè (track 5)
Mixing Engineer: Eren Gümrükçüoğlu
Mastering Engineer: Murat Çolak
Produced by: Eren Gümrükçüoğlu
Cover Design: Bora Tekoğul
Cover Photograph: United States Geological Survey
Of Rivers
Of Rivers
“Oboist Kyle Bruckmann, founding member of the wind quintet Splinter Reeds, releases of rivers, a collection of vanguard music for the instrument that highlights its integration with electronics, improvisational practices, extended techniques, and microtonality. The album features music by Jessie Cox, Hannah A. Barnes, Helen Grime, Linda Bouchard, Christopher Burns, and Bruckmann himself.
Kyle Bruckmann’s of rivers confronts the many expressive faces of the oboe and English horn head on. An instrument capable of sublime beauty alongside penetrating power, its contemporary repertoire as a solo voice has perhaps not yet eclipsed its prized role as the dark horse of the orchestral wind section. Bruckmann’s collection of newly commissioned acoustic and electro-acoustic works posits a way forward for those invested in the uncompromising avant-garde future for the instrument while carving out an individual artistic statement. In works by Jessie Cox, Hannah A. Barnes, Helen Grime, Linda Bouchard, Christopher Burns, and Bruckmann himself, we hear the clarion song of the oboe through dense, complex material that inhabits the vanguard of current compositional and performance practice.
Jessie Cox’s AT[ou]M functions like an introductory prelude to Bruckmann’s sonic journey; a quixotic soliloquy comprised of short phrases punctuated by brash multiphonics, pointillistic staccato utterances, and slowly bent sustained pitches. Throughout, the music returns to moments of poised silences, the meaning of the gesture preceding it echoing in the resonance left behind.
Hannah A. Barnes’ Dis/inte/gration employs a phase vocoder to interact with the live oboe part, creating “inherently unstable gestures in crisis and collapse.” The electronic element appears stealth-like at the piece’s one minute mark, modulating the oboe’s tone through subtle oscillation. The dialogue between processing and live part evolves, as the instrumental part becomes more frenetic and emphatic. Barnes’ oboe writing occasionally evokes the cathartic sheets of sound of John Coltrane’s late soprano sax improvisations, articulating harmonic information through rapid alternating trills, fierce multiphonics, and virtuosic passagework.
Helen Grime’s Arachne is a wordless setting of the myth of the weaving challenge between the goddess Minerva and Arachne, a mortal but master weaver. The short work narrates the plot of the interaction through contrasting material, first depicting Arachne’s over confidence, then the contest that leads to violence, and finally Arachne’s transformation into a spider. Grime’s visually evocative writing is energized, driving up to a repeated arrival note in the oboe’s highest register, before a flittering coda captures the furtive movements of the wily insect.
Linda Bouchard has a series of thirteen works that explore the nature and properties of water and the relationship humans have with the precious resource. DROP is written in graphic notation with images that are derived from analysis of various water sounds. Bruckmann brings his own improvisatory language to the interpretation of Bouchard’s score, interacting with the evocative electronics in complementary ways, imitating the non-pitched sounds. Bruckmann’s range of vocabulary of sounds in this performance is remarkable, imitating the cracking of ice, the whistle of steam, and pressurized water forcing its way through pipes alongside beguiling microtonal melodies worthy of snake charming rituals.
Bruckmann’s Proximity, affect is a piece born from circumstance, specifically the restrictive musical situations that arose in the deepest months of the Covid lockdown. Invited by UC Berkeley’s CNMAT department to do a livestream in November 2020, Bruckmann constructed a piece that involved close-micing sounds made on deconstructed parts of the oboe, creating a sonic landscape reminiscent of an orchestra of early dial-up modems. For a piece conceived from imposed limitation, Proximity, affect transcends a compressed expressive range and traverses an impressive structural journey.
The final work on the album is by Christopher Burns, and features EKG – a duo with Bruckmann with his collaborator Ernst Karel on electronics. The Mutiny of Rivers reflects Burns’ interest in finding a middle ground between Burns’ preference for digital audio with EKG’s affinity for analog electronics, as well as a Luigi Nono influenced approach to improvisation with a wealth of given material, both in the instrumental and electronic parts. Despite the variability inherent in any realization of Burns’ score, the performance has a discrete sense of structure, navigating in and out of soloistic moments for the English horn, interactive halls of sonic mirrors with electronics, and dystopian electronics-alone environments. Achieving an identity for a work that is organized in variable, quasi-improvised sections is a challenge, but one that Burns and EKG have embraced and overcome handily.
With of rivers, Kyle Bruckmann has achieved something rare and prized in contemporary instrumental recordings. We hear Bruckmann’s voice as a composer, improviser, curator, and interpreter speak powerfully throughout the collection. In most other contemporary music genres, the “sound” of the artist and the album are paramount, while in contemporary concert music, we applaud the contribution a performer makes when releasing an album of varied pieces that can enter the repertoire, even if their artistic personality takes a secondary role. But when both missions are served at the same time, it is a special album indeed. of rivers is such a recording, an impeccable document of these compelling works, a landmark recording for the oboe/English horn repertoire, and a powerful artistic statement from a versatile artist who has cultivated a collection of pieces that strike an ideal balance between aesthetic focus and engaging variety.” –Dan Lippel
—
Recorded by:
Charlotte Han (with assistant engineers Mary Denney & Mark Loya), Owen Hall Recording Studio, University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA), Oct. & Dec. 2022 (tracks 1-4)
Kyle Bruckmann, FeuerFroschHaus (Oakland, CA), Nov. 2020 (track 5)
Scott R. Looney, Studio 1510 (Oakland, CA), July 2010 (track 6)
Mixed & Mastered by:
Myles Boisen, Headless Buddha Mastering Labs (Oakland, CA)
Cover photo by: Dill Pixels
Interior photos by: Christina Deravedisian / Joel Filipe / Maxim Berg
Layout by: BMoen, Etch Image Co.
Iron Orchid
Iron Orchid
“Iron Orchid is an album-length electro-acoustic work for piano and electronics by New York composer David Bird in collaboration with pianist Ning Yu, released on New Focus Recordings. Iron Orchid builds on materials generated for the interactive sound sculpture Echo Chamber, an 11-foot metallic structure that Bird and Yu collaborated on with site-specific public artist Mark Reigelman II in 2019. Employing a wide range of techniques in dialogue with a constantly shifting electronic environment, Iron Orchid explores the relationship between human and computer-generated sounds, blurring the distinction between them with a catalog of inventive strategies, and creating a sound world in which the two become logical complements.
The realm of sound installation can trigger a lot of associations — static forms, ambient textures, ethereal timbres. Iron Orchid, the sibling musical work associated with the interactive multi-media sculpture Echo Chamber, defies these assumptions, covering a vast range of expressive and textural territory over its 34 minutes of music. Composer David Bird and pianist Ning Yu have cultivated a work that mines the material of the piano for its sonic potential (metal, wood, wire). The piece establishes immersive sound environments that are momentarily passive and active, while always evolving to create a larger expressive trajectory. The result is a piece that stands alone and independent as a powerful sonic document.
“Garden” opens the recording with a rolling tumult of microtonal tremolos in the low register of the piano, interwoven with apocalyptic, foreboding electronics. Later in the movement, chime-like harmonics activated with objects inside the piano toll in the accumulating winds of the electronics. “Iron” focuses on the variegated sound vocabulary of scrapes on the piano strings over an accumulating pillow of sine tones. As the electronics come alive into a percolating organism, we hear a solemn composite melody emerging from lone microtonal pitches.
“Interlude” begins a series of four short movements that make up the middle of the work, and which introduce a more conventional pianism, initially accompanied by dynamic electronics that respond with timed synchronicity. Over the course of “Prism,” we hear piano and electronics bubbling over as the line ascends in register, leaving only the twitching detritus of the musical exoskeleton of the movement as it ends. “A Thin War of Metal” settles into a deep groove allowing the piano to articulate angular, syncopated runs. Once again, an electronic doppelgänger replaces the acoustic image towards the end of the movement, providing a disconcerting mirror image. In “Between Walls,” the stunted sound of muted harmonics in the low register punctuates an unsettling undulation in the electronics.
The final movement in the piece, “Petals,” opens with haunting, anthropomorphic sounds emerging from a dystopian electronic landscape. Notes articulated with a slide inside the piano provide a plaintive counterpart to disembodied long tones over a background dotted by glitchy sounds of electronic interference. Iron Orchid is persistently dynamic. Electronics that provide context for the protagonist’s voice of the piano become animated while the keyboard role sometimes pivots to provide a layer in a multi-dimensional texture. Iron Orchid balances a character of alienation with an ever-present embedded lyricism that reaches out to the listener, a glint of light in austere expressive surroundings.” –Dan Lippel
—
“What comes through with clarion intensity in Iron Orchid, a collaboration between composer & producer David Bird and pianist Ning Yu, is material. The through line is metal, but a transmogrified metal, embodied in timbres that shift and evolve in real time from the familiar to the surreal to the non-real. The metal of piano wires takes on a life of its own, as in “Iron,” where the rough scraping of piano strings lay atop a gorgeous pillow of sine tones. Despite the album’s considerable electronic element, Bird and Yu embrace the full timbral range of the piano as an acoustic instrument: from the crinkling tactility of fingers on wire; to resonant sotto voce melodies; to the murky and microtonal piano tremolos that comprise the dark but fecund soil of album opener “Garden.” Because these sounds feel like the genesis for Iron Orchid’s electronic components, the intermingling of piano and production is utterly fluid. Complex, faint overtones from a muted piano string are replicated by sine tones and echo off into nothingness; pitches crack and collapse unexpectedly; pulsing, stuttering synth sounds combine with the twisting, tortured scraping of wire.
Iron Orchid began in 2019, with the interactive multimedia sculpture “Echo Chamber,” a collaboration between Bird, Yu, and sculptor Mark Reigelman. The 11-foot-tall sculpture was constructed of stacks of 56 metal tubes, each with an audio speaker inside. Scattered materials from Echo Chamber are woven into the fabric of Iron Orchid, which could be thought of as a guided aural tour of the sculpture. The sculpture is simultaneously absent and yet omnipresent. Stasis and momentum evoke motion through an imaginary environment, one haunted by a foreign and unknown object freighted with immense mass, and operating under its own logic.” –William Mason
—
Performed by Ning Yu
Composed and Produced by David Bird
Album Art by Mark Reigelman II
Engineered by Charles Mueller and Ryan Streber
Recorded at Oktaven Audio, Mt. Vernon, Ny
Album Liner Notes by William Mason
Mastered by Christopher Botta
Instrucciones de uso
Instrucciones de uso
“This collection of compositions for acoustic and electric guitar explores the idea of a puzzle as a formal and constitutive idea. Based on Georges Perec’s novel “La vie mode d’emploi” written in 1978, the pieces work as a fragmented single composition in which each piece is an essential element that placed all together conforms the whole.
Georges Perec wrote in the Preamble of La vie mode d’emploi, “…a puzzle is not a group of elements that we need first to isolate and analyze separately, but an ensemble, a form, a structure. The element does not precede the ensemble; it is not more immediate or more ancient. The elements do not determine the ensemble but is the ensemble that determines the elements…
Each one of these compositions contains a key element that, put all together, next to each other, reveals the original composition. Time, as we know, is a key factor in music and here our imagination needs to play games with it, in order to reconstruct the puzzle and form that final image.” -L. Ianes
—
Luis Ianes: Acoustic and electric guitar
All compositions by Luis Ianes
Recorded by Sam Nacht and Gonzalo Manco at Estudio Libres, Buenos Aires (Arg) on September, 2018
Mixed and Mastered by Sam Nacht at Libres on October, 2018
Art and Design by Juan Grippaldi
Hemlocks, Peacocks
Hemlocks, Peacocks
“Expansive microtonal chamber-jazz recorded in a large resonant chapel in New England. The music is inspired by La Monte Young’s epic composition “The Well Tuned Piano,” as well as by modernist works by painter Joan Mitchell and poet Wallace Stevens.
Hemlocks, Peacocks is a multi-movement composition by Will Mason, for a quartet of alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, retuned keyboards, and drums.
Mason’s music has always been characterized by the free intermingling of genres, and by an interest in microtonal pitch resources. His releases for his two-guitar, two-soprano, two-drum set rock band Happy Place made regular use of quarter-tone tunings, split across the two guitarists. But microtonal tunings pose special challenges for keyboard instruments: a 24-tone scale mapped onto the keyboard would mean that a pianist would have to reach the uncomfortable span of a minor 9th just to produce something that sounds like a perfect fifth. “I wanted to write music where all the instruments could feel fully at ease exploring these just intonation harmonies,” said Mason. “For the saxophones that might be a matter of learning some novel fingerings and embouchure changes, but for the keyboard it requires making some choices and trade-offs that really impact the kinds of composing and improvising available.”
Mason’s exploration of La Monte Young’s tuning system from his epic 1974 work The Well-Tuned Piano began because of Young’s elegant solution to mapping just intonation onto the piano. Young’s 12-note scale omits the fifth harmonic, resulting in an absence of justly-tuned major (5:4) and minor (6:5) thirds. One way of approaching the resulting scale is as a pentatonic scale with several shadings available of each pitch; another would be to construct a scale out of the septimal major (9:7, 35 cents wider than an equal-tempered major third) and minor (7:6, 33 cents narrower than an equal-tempered minor third) thirds. Young’s keyboard layout makes both approaches fairly intuitive; some familiar hand shapes, like the perfect fifth or octave, typically sound like a perfect fifth or octave. By contrast, a span of a minor 9th might sound beautifully consonant, and a major second might produce shrill beating.
There are some oblique quotations of Young’s composition in Mason’s piece, but it’s the fluidity and improvisational spirit of The Well-Tuned Piano that first endeared Mason to the work. More than anything else, this high degree of pre-compositional care toward performance is the thread that unites Mason’s composition with Young’s. In Hemlocks, Peacocks the just intonation tuning system of Young’s The Well Tuned Piano is set at two pitch levels on two separate keyboards, one rooted on C and the other on 436Hz (a slightly flat A). This allows for the use of the 5/4 just major third, which Young’s tuning system deliberately omitted. But it also allows for an array of clusters and shadings of pitches. Especially in the improvisational context of much of this music, this lends the keyboard a flexibility and expressivity that is not normally available to performers.
Hemlocks, Peacocks was written specifically for the group of performers assembled here: Anna Webber, Daniel Fisher-Lochhead, and deVon Russell Gray. Webber’s compositional work has encompassed just intonation tuning systems, as in her band “Shimmer Wince.” Fisher-Lochhead is a longtime collaborator with Mason, having played on his 2015 album “Beams of the Huge Night.” Gray is a polyglot musician, who works as a free jazz pianist, composer of contemporary music, and performs with the hip hop group Heiruspecs. In other words, everyone in the band is a composer-performer with omnivorous musical tastes. The album not only showcases the skills of its seasoned musicians, but also the acoustics of the cavernous chapel in Norton, Massachusetts where the album was recorded. The keyboards are modeled on the sound of the Fender Rhodes—an instrument that might cheekily be called microtonal no matter what its tuning system. The characteristic bark and bright beating of overtones that define that instrument are amplified and mutated by the reflections and reverberations of the chapel, all painstakingly captured by engineer Joseph Branciforte.
Hemlocks, Peacocks draws programmatic inspiration from the Joan Mitchell painting “Hemlock,” (1956) and from the Wallace Stevens poem “Domination of Black,” (1916) which inspired Mitchell. The Stevens poem obsessively traces and retraces a series of images, many of them evocative of death: poison hemlock, darkness, celestial bodies, all punctuated by the cries of peacocks, traditionally symbols of divinity and immortality. Mitchell’s painting is a flurry of bold emerald-green and black brush strokes against a faded background. Each stroke bends downward, as though freighted by snow. Flashes of azure and red punctuate the painting, evocative of Stevens’ peacocks.
Mason’s composition obliquely traces themes common to all three of the works which inspired it: an oscillation between repetition and perseveration on the one hand, expansive stillness on the other. Opening track “Hemlocks” is entirely through-composed, built around shadings and transpositions of a trilled 63:64 septimal comma (the interval between a justly-intoned natural seventh and an equal-tempered minor 7th). “The Fallen Leaves, Repeating Themselves” opens with a shifting sax duet that transitions from equal temperament to just intonation, before a melancholy just intonation melody. After an alto saxophone solo from Fisher-Lochhead, a strong and declamatory climax gradually loses steam. “Twilight” is structured around dense clustered chords in the keyboard whose pitches die out in irregular and unexpected ways; shadings of the blues appear and vanish in the murk. “Turned in the Fire,” which begins with a solo from Webber, loops a small series of chord progressions inspired by material from Young’s original composition, but expands and contracts them across a shifting series of meters. “Hymn,” a duet between Gray and Mason, riffs on three just intonation harmonizations of a sacred harp melody. “Planets” begins with a noisy improvised trio between Webber, Fisher-Lochhead, and Mason, before Gray enters with a quasi-canon of perfect fifths juxtaposed across the C and A436Hz keyboards. The final movement, “Peacocks,” sets a gentle contrapuntal melody in the keyboard against an insistent repeating saxophone line, which spirals out into a cloud of just intonation harmonies, and then into noise, and then into the slow fade of the drums, marching steadfastly into silence.” –Will Mason
—
Will Mason Quartet:
Anna Webber, tenor saxophone
Daniel Fisher-Lochhead, alto saxophone
deVon Russell Gray, keyboards
Will Mason, drums
All music composed by Will Mason
Recorded May 29 2024 in Cole Memorial Chapel, Norton, Massachusetts
Engineered and mixed by Joseph Branciforte, Greyfade Studios
Mastered by Carl Saff
Album art by Will Mason
Band photo by Colleen Morgan
Funk Poems for ‘Bird’
Funk Poems for ‘Bird’
Guitarist/composer Timuçin Şahin releases Funk Poems for ‘Bird’, a reckoning with the ghost of one of the most important figures in the history of jazz, Charlie Parker, as well as a document of Şahin’s unique collage of influences from the classical and improvisational avant-garde. Joined by pianist Cory Smythe, bassist Reggie Washington, and drummer Sean Rickman, Şahin’s double neck guitar (one standard neck and the other fretless neck in an alternate tuning) careens through textures that are shaped by Bird’s spirit while also being infused with the rhythmic energy of funk music and the chromatic pitch vocabulary of 20th century modernists.
—
Flow State: Timuçin Şahin, guitar
Cory Smythe: piano
Reggie Washington: bass
Sean Rickman: drums
Recorded January 2020 at Hayyam Studios Istanbul
Recording Engineers: Alp Turaç and Sinan Sakızlı
Baritone guitar recordings: Arel and Mimaroğlu Studios Yaşar University Izmir
Recording Engineer: Mehmet Can Özer
Confirmation on 1, is recorded at Acoustic Recording Studios in New York
Recording Engineer: Peter Karl
Mix and Mastering by Saygın Özatmaca
Cover and Recording Session Photos: Turgay Yalçın
Live Photos: Özge Balkan
Graphic Design: Negrican Birlik
End Stages, Violin Concerto
End Stages, Violin Concerto
A follow up to his haunting “Images from a Closed Ward,” New Focus releases a recording of two recent works by Michael Hersch, his Violin Concerto, performed by the virtuoso Patricia Kopatchinskaja with the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), and his work “end stages,” in a performance by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. With both pieces, Hersch reinforces his reputation as a composer of gripping music, unafraid to tackle through sound the most vulnerable and difficult corners of the human psyche.
—
Patricia Kopatchinskaja, violin
Tito Muñoz, conductor
International Contemporary Ensemble; tracks 1-4
Orpheus Chamber Orchestra; tracks 5-12
Violin Concerto recorded at Oktaven Audio. Mount Vernon, New York Recorded and engineered by Ryan Streber
Edited and produced by Jacob Greenberg and Ryan Streber
end stages recorded live at Mechanics Hall. Worcester, MA. Recorded and engineered by Joseph C. Chilorio
Edited and produced by Jacob Greenberg and Ryan Streber Additional editing by Charles Mueller
Violin Concerto and end stages published by 21C Music Publishing, Inc./Michael Hersch Music
©21C Music Publishing, Inc./Michael Hersch Music
Cover photo by Tito Muñoz
Other album photography by Mike Maguire and John Dean
CD liner notes by Aaron Grad ©2018
CD Design – Jessica Slaven at Oktaven Audio
Dot : Line : Sigh
Dot : Line : Sigh
Composer Osnat Netzer releases her debut recording, featuring performances by Ensemble Dal Niente in full ensemble and chamber settings, saxophonist Geoffrey Landman, Mivos Quartet, flutist Eric Lamb, violist Michael Hall, pianist Marianne Parker, and the ~Nois saxophone quartet. Netzer’s music engages with various abstract concepts, including cognitive linguistics and the experience of physicality.
“Ebullient, pensive, whimsical, and mysterious by turns, Osnat Netzer’s new music presents a multifaceted and deeply riveting gestural world.” -George Lewis
—
“In the opening paragraph of her eloquent liner notes for Dot : Line : Sigh, Osnat Netzer explains the genesis of this creative title. Since 2014, her work has been influenced by an interest in cognitive linguistics, and those explorations manifest in her work as ways of employing musical vocabulary. “Dot : Line” then is a gesture involving a punctuated sustain; “sigh” manifests as a stylized, contoured line. Throughout the works on Dot : Line : Sigh, we hear this elemental dichotomy despite divergent aesthetic undercurrents in the music.
The opening track, They bury their dead with great ululations, references a tradition of hiring women to wail at funerals, as a way of giving permission to the mourners to release their own grief. Originally written for Winsor Music and performed here by Ensemble Dal Niente, the piece opens with plaintive unisons that divide and stretch against one another, catalyzing fervent passagework that rotates around the central pitch. Scurrying activity builds in the strings underneath slowly bent notes in the winds before diminishing to a breathy texture with eerie pointillistic passages. Growing insistence in the accompaniment supports lyrical material in the winds before we hear the characteristic unison gesture from the opening return. Netzer makes an analogy between the hired wailers and artists – indeed, art’s function is to give license to experience on a deeper level.
Pillars, for alto saxophone and piano, opens with a series of punctuated complex timbres – a version of the “dot : line” Netzer mentions in the notes. As we are drawn into this hybrid timbre, Netzer varies what happens within that sustained duration; the piano subdivides the duration with repeated notes or angular figures, the sung note in the saxophone glides up to a different pitch. The piece evolves through a kind of counterpoint of layered ideas; many of the fragments Netzer introduces early on are fleshed out and integrated with each other and built into a vigorous texture. During the second half of the piece, Netzer takes a playful approach to subverting the groove with accents that articulate odd groupings.
I won’t be outrun by a cavalry of snails for two sopranos and ensemble is theatrical in nature, living in a fantastical, feverish space of abstraction. The vocals are comprised of nonsense words and extended vocal techniques, and merge with the gestural, virtuosic quality of the instrumental playing. Doppler effect-esque passages enhance the work’s surreality, always living somewhere in between the real and unreal.
Schertch (scherzo sketch) is a short work for flute and string quartet, inhabiting a scherzo character and flaunting phrase expectations in Hayden-esque fashion. As in Pillars, Netzer’s affinity for rhythmic play takes a forward role, while angular lines are offset by sighing gestures. The piece contains the album’s most neoclassical music, and it is a treat to hear Netzer have fun toying with the historical template.
Balance is at the core of Contrapose, a work for viola and piano. Drawing inspiration from the Vijñāna school of yoga, Netzer embedded concepts of “rooting” and “connecting” into the work; the basis of this philosophy is that every impulse must be balanced out by its opposite. In Contrapose, this means the viola and piano are constantly equalizing the gestural, timbral, and motivic vocabulary of the piece.
Netzer writes that I AM FUCKING ZEN for saxophone quartet is “a process-based composition, wherein a short musical idea undergoes gradual transformations.” The pitch material moves seamlessly between triadic structures and microtonal inflections of the corresponding pitches, creating an intentional disorientation. Off-kilter rhythms percolate within a context of quick dynamic contrasts, creating a kind of linear counterpoint of associated material. Netzer ingeniously leads the quartet in and out of quasi-unison passages that break independently before linking up again. Later in the piece, the horns imitate each other’s contour, distorting it through augmentation, diminution, and pitch adjustment. Irregular unisons return to close out this unique and affecting piece.
The album closes with away dream all away for soprano, flute, and viola, a light hearted, neo-soul setting of a text by Samuel Beckett. The material is presented in modular fashion, interspersing fragments that each have their own character and profile. Jagged repetition with occasional variation plays a significant role in the piece, as familiar material is recontextualized and changes meaning as its surroundings shift. Amanda DeBoer Bartlett’s soprano alternates between taking a lyrical lead and functioning as a third instrument, punctuating the timbral texture of the flute and viola.” –Dan Lippel
—
They bury their dead with great ululations
Ensemble Dal Niente: Andrew Nogal, oboe; Katherine Schoepflin Jimoh, bass clarinet; Hanna Hurwitz, violin; Juan Horie, cello; Michael Lewanski, conductor
Recorded July 14, 2023 at Gannon Hall, Holtschneider Performance Center, DePaul School of Music, Chicago, IL
Producer: Osnat Netzer
Engineer: Dan Nichols
Edited and mixed by Dan Nichols at Aphorism Audio
Pillars
Geoffrey Landman, alto saxophone; Osnat Netzer, piano
Recorded March 24, 2022 at Pickman Hall, Longy School of Music, Cambridge, MA
Recording producer, sound engineer, editing and mix: Zach Herchen
I won’t be outrun by a cavalry of snails
Ensemble Dal Niente: Carrie Henneman Shaw and Amanda DeBoer Bartlett, sopranos; Emma Hospelhorn, flutes; Katherine Schoepflin Jimoh, clarinets; Winston Choi, piano; Hanna Hurwitz, violin; Ammie Brod, viola; Juan Horie, cello; Michael Lewanski, conductor
Recorded June 14, 2021 at Nichols Concert Hall, Music Institute of Chicago, Evanston, IL Producer: Benjamin Melsky
Technical Assistance: Igor Santos
Engineer: Dan Nichols
Edited and mixed by Dan Nichols at Aphorism Audio
Schertch (scherzo sketch)
Mivos Quartet; Eric Lamb, alto flute
Recorded February 1, 2023 at 4tune Audio Productions, Vienna, Austria
Producer: Osnat Netzer
Recording producer, sound engineer, editing and mix: Martin Klebhan
Contrapose
Michael Hall, viola; Marianne Parker, piano
Recorded October 8, 2022 at Gannon Hall, Holtschneider Performance Center, DePaul School of Music, Chicago, IL
Producer: Osnat Netzer
Assistant Producer: Annegret Klaua
Engineer: Dan Nichols
Edited and mixed by Dan Nichols at Aphorism Audio
I AM FUCKING ZEN
~Nois
Recorded April 29, 2023 at Gannon Hall, Holtschneider Performance Center, DePaul School of Music, Chicago, IL
Producer: Osnat Netzer
Engineer: Dan Nichols
Edited and mixed by Dan Nichols at Aphorism Audio
away dream all away
Amanda DeBoer Bartlett, soprano; Constance Volk, flute; Doyle Armbrust, viola
Recorded March 31, 2023 at Gannon Hall, Holtschneider Performance Center, DePaul School of Music, Chicago, IL
Producer: Osnat Netzer
Co-producer and assistant engineer: Frank McKearn IV
Engineer: Dan Nichols
Edited and mixed by Dan Nichols at Aphorism Audio
Mastered by Fredrick Gifford
Cover artwork by Ayala Netzer (all rights reserved) Headshot by Steven Sacks
Design, layout & typography by Marc Wolf
Différance
Différance
This collection of electronic and electro-acoustic pieces by one of Mexico’s most prolific young composers explores a pallette of sonic materials derived from the technological and online worlds.
“For the past eight years, a correlated and particular use of electronic processes and acoustic sounds has been a very important element in my musical work, and this is mirrored in the fact that all of the pieces collected here are either pure electronic pieces or have an electronic element involved. Each piece focuses on different cleansing “techniques” to try getting closer to that intuitive consciousness: Apnea tries to establish itself in the obscure boundaries of recognition between acoustic and electronically processed sounds; in Memento, the uses of distorted sounds (although similar to those of the piano) are intended to break our relationship to that instrument; ∞¿? exists in the world of uncertainty between sounds that are intentionally crafted by a creator versus sounds that are the “accidental” result of the unpredictable; the sounds in Sturm und Drang struggle to free themselves from their teleological destiny through manipulation of time relationships and spatial movement within the stereo field, striving to isolate themselves from their related past and future events; the sound content of Modem / line in renders the distinction between “noise” and “sound” irrelevant since noise is the fundamental sonic material of its composition; Stimmtausch leads itself out of its “original” sound identity, gradually transforming the work along a curve from pure voices to noise; Adult rated relies on the ‘harshness’ of its sound source to build its discourse; and in Dogma the incisive use of a visual sound representation which constitutes the video component of this piece strives to change its original purpose across time, from a technical tool of sound analysis into an actual musical representation– even notation — system.”
—
0- DOGMA (2006) ELECTRONIC MUSIC AND VIDEO
Created with the support of the Mexican Youth Institute’s Artistic Projects Sponsorship Program 2006. Created at composer’s studio in Querétaro, México
1- MODEM/LINE IN (2005) ELECTRONIC MUSIC
World premiere: October 3, 2005, Project Itinerant, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Created at composer’s studio in Querétaro, México
2- STURM UND DRANG (2003) ELECTRONIC MUSIC
World premiere: June 13, 2004, V Bienal Internacional de Música Eletroacústica de São Paulo
Created at composer’s studio in Querétaro, México
3- MEMENTO (2004-2005) PIANO AND TAPE
Created with the sponsorship of the Querétaro State Fund for the Culture and Arts’s Young Creators Grant 2004-2005. World premiere: May 30, 2008, 30o Foro Internacional de Música Nueva, México D.F.
Recording/Editing/Post-production: Edgar Guzmán
4- APNEA (2004-2005) ACOUSTIC GUITAR AND TAPE
Created with the sponsorship of the Querétaro State Fund for the Culture and Arts’s Young Creators Grant 2004-2005. World premiere: March 12, 2005, Querétaro, México
Recorded by Ignacio Baca Lobera
Editing/Post-production: Edgar Guzmán
5- STIMMTAUSCH (2005) STEREO VERSION-ELECTRONIC MUSIC
Original version for eight channels created in Artistic Residency at the LIPM, Buenos Aires, Argentina, August, 2005
6- ADULT RATED (2007) ELECTRONIC MUSIC
Created with the sponsorship of the National Fund for the Culture and Arts’s Young Creators Grant 2006-2005
Created at composer’s studio in Querétaro, México
7- ∞¿? (2008) BASSOON AND ELECTRONICS
World premiere, October 29, 2008, ICETANK! Concert II, New York, NY
Recording/Editing/Post-production: Joshua Rubin
Electronics technician: Nathan Davis
Album layout and program notes: Edgar Guzmán
Producer: Edgar Guzmán
Project Advisor: Daniel Lippel
Diary of a Left Handed Sleepwalker
Diary of a Left Handed Sleepwalker
Minneapolis based composer and live electronics performer Scott Miller teams up with Estonian guitarist Mart Soo as “Three Free Radicals” for this collection of free improvisations. The collaboration was the result of Miller’s Fulbright sponsored six month stay in Tallinn where he discovered a fertile avant garde improvisation scene.
—
Recording engineer: Peeter Salmela
Producers: Scott L. Miller and Mart Soo
Mastering engineer: Margo Kõlar
Design: Raul Keller
Cybersonic Outreach
Cybersonic Outreach
“Composer, trumpeter, and improviser Mark Kirschenmann releases Cybersonic Outreach, a focused collection of improvisations for processed trumpet and electronics. Kirschenmann’s scholarship has focused on improvising practices, and he has cultivated his own unique approach that draws on wide ranging sources, from Messiaen to Stockhausen to Morton Subotnick, Miles Davis to Ornette Coleman, and including various idiomatic musical traditions.
Kirschenmann’s approach on this release remains consistent throughout — for each piece, he establishes an electronic environment that evolves during the track, and uses effects and processing to transform his trumpet into a different instrumental voice. Within the context of that “instrument,” Kirschenmann then explores pitch and gestural material, mining it for depth. His patient excavation of unconventional scalar and melodic materials frequently takes on a ritualistic character, functioning as a meditation on expressive affect, gesture, and registral expansion that shares some characteristics with Indian classical music. Within this consistent soloist and electronics frame, Kirschenmann’s palette is broad, cultivating several unique timbres and sonic devices.
Kirschenmann’s ability to transform the timbre of his trumpet is remarkable — he can sound like an exotic double reed instrument one moment (Long Walk), a flute/piccolo the next (The Cascades), and a pitch shifting electric keyboard out of 70’s fusion after that (Turning Time Tables and Lamentation for my Mother). Sometimes the effects on the trumpet sound are more overt, as in the harmonized arpeggiations of Out of Bounds, while at other times it seems Kirschenmann is able to generate timbral transformation largely through his own control of the horn, like in the prayerful, quasi-vocal dialogue between low and high registers in Duet for Vocaloid Trumbots.
Similarly, the electronics are alternately ambient and active. In The Cascades, they are glitchy, evoking the percolation of a vintage mainframe. In Out of Bounds, they establish a nocturnal landscape of insistent crickets and insects. Color Wheel features a mournful low brass sound, a “tuba mirum” of sorts, over an increasingly active electronic part of unsettling bell sounds. They establish an introspective harmonic pad that supports Kirschenmann’s poignant phrasing in Lamentation for my Mother.
Cybersonic Outreach is a manifestation of Kirschenmann’s meticulously cultivated approach to improvisation, timbre, and technology. But it is also a deeply felt personal statement, an hour’s worth of music that manifests a spiritual journey. It is this marriage of the intellectual and ineffable impulses that make Kirschenmann’s work so impactful and uniquely moving.” –Dan Lippel
—
Produced, composed, performed, engineered and mixed at home in Ann Arbor, MI during the COVID-19 pandemic by Mark Kirschenmann
Mastered by Margaret Luthar at Welcome to 1979, Nashville, TN
Artwork by Ken Kozora