elsewhere

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A number of days have gone by since my last post, and I’ve been hoping to write something substantial. But as it happens, some much-needed work has been keeping me very busy. If you’d like to read something like, say, an interview with a young and fascinating composer, complete with a score and sound excerpt, you could do no better than the inaugural post of Tim Rutherford-Johnson’s 10 for ’10 series on The Rambler. Included in that post is an interview with Evan Johnson, a complete score, and a sound excerpt from Apostrophe 2 (pressing down on my sternum), that will be performed by ELISION on February 8th at King’s Place in London. Oh, and if you can make it to that concert, do. (See my earlier post for background or the rambler’s recent plug for the relevant info.)

ELISION‘s November 20th performance of Richard Barrett’s Opening of the Mouth is currently available on BBC’s Hear and Now. It’s the final broadcast of Huddersfield 2009, available through Saturday. Scroll directly to the 16:30 mark to start listening to the material about the piece. Following an interview with Barrett, the performance starts at 19:54.

finds (2)

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1) In the very (very) near future, I will be adding an entry to my links page: Steven Kazuo Takasugi. There’s one piece I love the most, but I’m not even going to tell you which. They are all astonishing.

Included at the end of his bio are instructions for listening:

Laptop (Computer) to Headphones = Not Ideal!
Laptop (Computer) to Stereo Amplifier to Headphones = Good!
(Volume and physicality of sound are of utmost importance)
Lights out.

2) I didn’t know Jem Finer was a founding member of the Pogues when I came across Score for a Hole in the Ground. Now I want to go to this forest in Kent.

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Finer is also involved in a thousand-year-long, multi-continental composition/trust/graphic score/assemblage of Tibetan bowls called Longplayer.

3) Eric Wubbels’ excellent review of Nature/Culture, Peter Evans‘ latest solo CD.

4) One of the most interesting thinkers (and doers) in the sound arena shows up in the mainstream media. I was not expecting that. I’m not so sure that David Dunn would classify himself as an avant-garde composer as the subtitle does, but the content of this article, Beetle Mania, in The Atlantic is just fine, and actually quite funny at points.

5) A surprisingly engaging review in the LA Times of a Monday Evening Concert called “Mostly Californian.”

6) A ticket. Boston to London, where I’ll hear ELISION play a great program titled Terrain (after the Ferneyhough piece, which is included). Also on the program are works by Liza Lim, Aaron Cassidy, Bryn Harrison, Mary Bellamy, and James Dillon. Then from London on to Berlin for MaerzMusik, whose program has just been announced today.

two recordings and a few distributors

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I had two parallel experiences within the past month.

On the bus ride home from New York, I was tired and uncomfortable. Finally I realized the discomfort was of an aural sort. Someone a row ahead of me had decided to make all of her phone calls during the four-hour ride, and it was irritating me no end. I pullled out the CDs I had gotten the day before from Michael Pisaro after quite a wonderful performance of his new piece at Experimental Intermedia. Several of them involved quite a lot of silence, and that was not going to help me in this situation. But then there was hearing metal 1: three pieces, all made from sine tones woven in with recordings of a tam-tam played by Greg Stuart. I put it in my laptop, put on my (early Christmas present) Bose headphones, and in a moment realized I was not stuck on a bus hearing someone’s conversation. I was traveling through one incredibly beautiful and complex sound world after another. The closest visual experience I can think of is walking through fresh snow. There is a sameness, but you can watch how it settles in different contexts and how the light hits it, and how you impact it by being in it. That afternoon on the bus, I fell asleep in this world (I really needed to sleep), woke up and listened with that special waking-listening, heard it through to the end, started over, and over, and stayed right there until we pulled in to South Station.

Last Tuesday, nothing was going smoothly. Everything that might have happened seemed blocked, or delayed, or just too difficult. Finally I had to leave the house in the mid-afternoon to drive to one meeting and then another. I brought a CD called Over Shadows. Rhodri Davies was playing his own piece on harp, using EBow throughout. Normally road noise is a huge obstacle to hearing what is happening in the music that interests me most. But these sounds carried beautifully, and made the drive (up Route 128 through rush hour traffic near Boston) totally beautiful and interesting. The ways that Davies layers the sounds, and pulls off them one from another and combines them towards other effects are really masterful. I put it on just now to try to find a better way to describe it and realized two things: that I can’t, and that I can’t bring myself to turn it off. (The review included in the title link is much more descriptive.)

These two CDs have something else in common beyond using limited materials and completely turning my day around: they’re both available in the US through erstwhile records. Primarily a label for electroacoustic improvised music, it has also become a very successful US distributor for wandelweiser CDs, among others. Worldwide distributors for Pisaro’s recordings are listed on this Edition Wandelweiser directory. In Europe, you can get most of Davies’ CDs at Sound 323. In reading about Sound 323’s history, I finally learned about the origins of a beautiful and fascinating book and DVD that I got hold of a couple years ago, Blocks of Consciousness and the Unbroken Continuum.

Since this post has morphed into a listing of helpful distributors, I’ll go ahead and mention one that I just learned about that is quite close to where I live–miramoglu music sales, based in Porter Square in Cambridge, MA. They don’t happen to have the CDs in stock that I wrote about, but they have other work by both Pisaro and Davies, as well as many other artists that you’re not likely to find on Amazon.