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Morgan EVANS-WEILER
“Unfinished Variations (for Jed Speare)”
The remarkable Boston violinist and composer Morgan Evans-Weiler doesn’t have a score for this record, but its focus is ultra-precise. The piece, dedicated to the stalwart experimentalist Jed Speare, a close friend of the musician and who died in 2016, is a rigorous exploration of pitch, specifically in the microtonal complexity of the simplest bowed gestures. Evans-Weiler relies on a handful of simple pitch variations from memory, but ultimately the results don’t rely on any sort of melodic movement. Rather, the violinist pulls his bow across the strings in richly striated tones both gentle and piercing, marbled by a bounty of sounds—high-pitched squeals, abraded drags, intensely ringing double stops—that eventually bypass the lack of compositional shape to create an enveloping experience all its own.
Evans-Weiler explained that “the performance of the piece is specifically dictated by my experience of the repetitions and the fatigue that accompanies,” and that certainly can apply to the listener, whose level of engagement depends on a certain freshness of the ears, the volume of playback, and attention level. The performance draws heavily on psychoacoustics, where an immersion in the sounds creates an almost psychedelic experience—where the bowed violin seems to produce ever-fattening tones, both viscous and biting. Extended passages are interrupted by brief moments of silent repose, with the violinist changing his fingering before embracing a slightly different pitch—it also allows the listener to recalibrate and retrench for another study that builds in volume and attack. It’s probably not for everyone, but the degree of focus and the richness of Evans-Weiler’s sound-worlds are nothing short of astonishing. - Peter Margasak, Bandcamp Daily
14,00€
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Prune BÉCHEAU
“Stries ton, tripes et poils”
Prune Bécheau lives and works in France (Dordogne). Classically trained on the baroque violin, she has distanced herself from a traditional approach in order to express her idiosyncratic range of glitch sounds using special bow pressure and angle techniques performed solo or collectively in Europe. She is a member of the bands Pancrace (Penultimate Press, 2017) and Urs Graf Consort (Synchronies / La République des Granges, 2016) in which she also sings and plays keyboards (organ, piano, synthesizer) as well as of the sextet La Peuge. She is also involved in sound theory and contextual installations here and there.
The album ”Stries ton, tripes et poils” is comprised of a series of pieces exploring microtonality and specific timbres produced through different usages of the bow, playing with the diverse relationships between horse hair and gut strings (pressure / angle / velocity of the bow, transversal / oblique / torsional frictions, etc). The music is neither fully written nor completely improvised. It breaks the integrity of sounds and sound sets through obsessive physical processes to the point of highlighting specific ritornellos - composed of overtones, undertones and “off tones”. This “geographical” approach of the concrete violin-object has been influenced by music as diverse as Bach and Wyschnegradsky, polyphonic Pygmy music and Inuit throat singing, the sound of birdsongs and frogs. - Prune Bécheau
14,00€
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Matt SARGENT
“Ghost Music”
Recorded by Ryan Streber at Oktaven Audio in Yonkers, NY, November 2015.
Matt Sargent teaches music at Bard College, which lies close by the Hudson River, and percussionist Bill Solomon, the sole performer on Ghost Music, is a member of Ensemble Signal. Since the music of Steve Reich figures prominently in the Ensemble’s repertoire, and this piece is composed of spare, often repetitive bell tones, it would be easy to file it under New York minimalism - easy, but incomplete. Solomon is also a member of Queer Percussion Research Group, and Weighter Music is operated by Sarah Hennies, whose own music has articulated the isolation and confusion she experienced before coming out as a trans woman. When Sargent first composed the piece a decade ago, he conceived it as “a movable sanctuary.” This music isn’t about following in anyone’s footsteps; it uses bare resources to establish a bounded and essential space. - Bill Meyer, The Wire Magazine August 2018
14,00€
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Tim FEENEY
“Caroline”
Performed and recorded by Tim Feeney in Berkshire, NY, and Tuscaloosa, AL, 2010-2013.
Tim Feeney seeks to explore and examine the timbral possibilities inherent
in everyday found and built objects. He treats his percussion setup as a
friction instrument, using bows, scrapers, and rosined drumheads to capture
and amplify frequencies that go unheard when an object is struck with a
traditional mallet. He supplements this acoustic console with an electronic
instrument, arranged from mixers, contact microphones, and effects pedals,
that synthesizes and alters the spectral characteristics of low-fidelity tones,
feedback, and noise.
Tim worked for years within Boston’s timbral improvising community, a group of
musicians interested in unstable sounds and silences, exploring austere
combinations of sound and the otherworldly ripple effects that pulse through
a silent space and alert ears. He has performed with musicians including
thereminist James Coleman, cellist/electronic musician Vic Rawlings, pianist Annie Lewandowski, tape-deck manipulator Howard Stelzer, trumpeter Nate
Wooley, sound artists Jed Speare and Ernst Karel, saxophonist Jack Wright,
the trio Meridian (with percussionists Nick Hennies and Greg Stuart), and
the trio ONDA (with vocalist Ken Ueno and violinist Hillary Zipper. His
concerts have been held at experimental spaces such as the Red Room in
Baltimore, Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art, Firehouse 12 in New
Haven, Connecticut, the Knitting Factory New York, and the Stone, as well as
the Center for New Music and Audio Technology at UC-Berkeley, the Stanford
Art Museum, Princeton University, and Dartmouth College.
Tim Feeney seeks to explore and examine the timbral possibilities inherent
in everyday found and built objects. He treats his percussion setup as a
friction instrument, using bows, scrapers, and rosined drumheads to capture
and amplify frequencies that go unheard when an object is struck with a
traditional mallet. He supplements this acoustic console with an electronic
instrument, arranged from mixers, contact microphones, and effects pedals,
that synthesizes and alters the spectral characteristics of low-fidelity tones,
feedback, and noise.
Tim worked for years within Boston’s timbral improvising community, a group of
musicians interested in unstable sounds and silences, exploring austere
combinations of sound and the otherworldly ripple effects that pulse through
a silent space and alert ears. He has performed with musicians including
thereminist James Coleman, cellist/electronic musician Vic Rawlings, pianist Annie Lewandowski, tape-deck manipulator Howard Stelzer, trumpeter Nate
Wooley, sound artists Jed Speare and Ernst Karel, saxophonist Jack Wright,
the trio Meridian (with percussionists Nick Hennies and Greg Stuart), and
the trio ONDA (with vocalist Ken Ueno and violinist Hillary Zipper. His
concerts have been held at experimental spaces such as the Red Room in
Baltimore, Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art, Firehouse 12 in New
Haven, Connecticut, the Knitting Factory New York, and the Stone, as well as
the Center for New Music and Audio Technology at UC-Berkeley, the Stanford
Art Museum, Princeton University, and Dartmouth College.
Original price was: 12,00€.5,00€Current price is: 5,00€.