This is a recording of an ambient noise improv piece -- recorded in the basement of a 500 year old monastery. There is also a dance collab from last semester, and it's already up so check out Nick's post ! I'm interested in the way sound interacts with environment, visual stimulations, etc. I also down to always experiment new ideas/sounds with my bassoon!
This piece is from a collection of short electro-acoustic works titled Chicago Street
Portraits. Lately, I have been admiring Anna Clyne's use of setting and field recording. The recording was taken when she was walking home in Chicago sometime in 2013.
Site specificity is an incredible thing you bring up in your piece and I'd love to see how you would propose to take that concept and work with it in this class knowing the performance would take place in Davis studio. Would you approach it with Davis in mind or aim to perform a piece in a different space and use that recording in the Davis performance? I feel like there's a lot there.
ReplyDeleteI'm really inspired by this Anna Clyne piece! I'm a huge fan of field recordings and collecting samples in everyday life to be used later and this is done beautifully.
I like how the work of yours that you shared as well as the work from Chicago Street Portraits focuses on the emotion elicited through sonic environments over things like lyrics or rhythm. In the face of all the political shouting matches plaguing our society, this sense of calm and harmony sends a powerful, constructive message.
ReplyDeleteWhat a beautiful piece of music! I took a mini-course with Sungwoo but never got to hear him play his violin, so it was lovely to hear him! I love the intense energy being translated through the active, improvised communication between all the musicians. It reels me in through the score's entirety. It's a great example to show how sound can really influence how a person feels and create a whole new atmosphere for them as they're listening.
ReplyDeleteThe two pieces are deliver such different feelings, but I feel like both scores do a great job at using multiple mediums of sound together in a harmonious and intriguing way.
What was the experience like to improvise in a monastery?! Did anything shift in the dynamic between you and your collaborators? I like visualizing each instrument as different strands that overlap and veer off on their own.
ReplyDeleteI think sourcing sound material from the environment is a great tool for creating/composing. It's nice to hear in Anne Clyne piece how she chose to integrate the field recordings. The track held my attention the whole time.
That ambient piece is super cool. I really enjoy the various textures that are brought to the mix. I feel like this coincides with Brad's question about making protest music that's serene. It'd be really interesting to combine reactive visuals and maybe have a vocalist over the drones. I admire the fact that you got to record in such a sacred space. Old religious buildings have always impacted me; even as a fairly pseudo-spiritual person.
ReplyDeleteYour ambient piece was great! I really liked the reverb moving in the space and that loud sustained chord after it fell to silence was great! It made my skin crawl for sure. The Bang on a can all stars piece is great. Every time I listen to them I can't get the scene from arthur involving binky and the headphones out of my head. I'm very intrigued by slow improvisations and would love to explore that more.
ReplyDeleteThis first is so meditative. I really enjoy the piano drone and the string swells. Thinking about space and how one fills it is such an interesting concept to explore within the context of improv.
ReplyDeleteI am always intrigued by unique performance spaces such as in your first example. I was prompted to consider that the location of a performance, whether it plays significantly into the sonic outcome or not (usually it does), is so important. For instance, a church is a location with certain meaning and baggage.
ReplyDeleteI love the sort of everyday experience of your second example. For me, it seems to suggest that all things can be musical if you want them to be.
I really enjoyed listening to the performance that you said was in the basement of a 500 year old monastery; that's such an interesting location to perform. I could hear that the space added a really nice reverberant tail to some of the short impulses instruments were playing and I like to hear the space become part of the performance and sort of sing back.
ReplyDeleteAlso I am very curious how A Wonderful Day was done, and if it was done with some kind of talkbox or if they used the voice of the original recording to do it or if it was a performer in real time. I really love using vocoding and similar tools in my own work; the marriage of voice and synth is really important to me and gets me thinking a lot about musical linguistics and how our language inflections aren't so different from how our music speaks to us.
The improvisation is so compelling. I love the way the bassoon and low strings [bass? cello?] impart those enveloped tones to almost 'probe' or excite the space. One thing we can do with so many loudspeakers in Davis is to simulate different acoustic environments. It would be amazing to conceive a piece where the [virtual] acoustic environment changes and music changes accordingly.
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