Categories
Releases

New and Coming Unexplained Sounds Group Releases

Source: Unexplained Sounds Group.

Music For Abandoned Monasteries (preview)

There is something a bit creepy about an abandoned building, knowing that it was once full of life and is now empty, often crumbling and taken back by nature. It’s even more haunting when it’s a monastery. These architectural marvels stand empty and abandoned, providing a fascinating, mysterious and sometimes creepy look not only into the past, but also into their ghostlike present. Eighth Tower invited 15 musicians from all over the world to create music and soundscapes inspired by abandoned monasteries and aiming to evoke the psychological effect they have upon us. https://www.patreon.com/eighthtower

Anthology Of Electroacoustic Music From Finland

There is a long tradition of Electroacoustic music in Finland beginning in the 1950’s with the experimentation of tape music. Finland’s first electronic musical instrument the “Sähkövalopiano” or “Electric Light Piano” was built before this in 1894. It was constructed in the Polytechnic Institute (now Aalto University) in Helsinki. Finland also has a tradition of blending archaic traditional music in the contemporary music scene. Unexplained Sounds Group is proud to investigate that area of music research by publishing an anthology focused on it.

https://unexplainedsoundsgroup.bandcamp.com/album/anthology-of-electroacoustic-music-from-finland

Categories
Reviews

The Best Experimental Music on Bandcamp: May 2023

Source: Bandcamp Daily.

All kinds of experimental music can be found on Bandcamp: free jazz, avant-rock, dense noise, outer-limits electronics, deconstructed folk, abstract spoken word, and so much more. If an artist is trying something new with an established form or inventing a new one completely, there’s a good chance they’re doing it on Bandcamp. Each month, Marc Masters picks some of the best releases from across this wide, exploratory spectrum. May’s selection includes water-drenched sketches, abstract odes to lost homelands, field recordings from the British Isles, and an astounding document of the beginning of a relationship that lasted 50 years.

Categories
Reviews

Vital Weekly Reviews 1389

Source: Vital Weekly.

THE [LAW-RAH] COLLECTIVE – INTROSPECTION (CD by Raubbau) *
K2 – PANDEMIX CORONALIS (CD by 999 Cuts) *
N. – SOUND IMPLOSION (CD by 999 Cuts) *
MOURN – MASTEMA (CD by 999 Cuts / Steinklang) *
NEO ARCHĒ – PEARLS (CD by Edgetone Records) *
AUTORHYTHM – SONGS FOR THE NERVOUS SYSTEM (CD by Thanatosis) *
MATTER – FRAMMENTI (CD by I Shall Sing Until My Land Is Free) *
SCHNEIDER TM – EREIGNISHORIZONT (2CD by Karlrecords) *
ANDREA PENSADO – CIRCUS PARADE (CD by Artsy Records) *
JOZEF DUMOULIN – THIS BODY, THIS LIFE (CD by Carton Records) *
AILA TRIO – SHAPED BY SEA WAVES (2LP, private) *
DEVIN GRAY – MOST DEFINITELY (CDR/LP by Rataplan Records) *
SMAELY P – (ARE YOU TAKEN) ABACK (CDR by Chocolate Monk) *
ARCANE DEVICE – PLAYS THE MUSIC OF J. S. BACH (CDR by Pulsewidth) *
ILLUSION OF SAFETY – FRONTAL (cassette by Human Hood Recordings) *
EVAN LINDORFF-ELLERY – TAPE COLLAGE PIECE 2011 (cassette by Falt) *
EVAN LINDORFF-ELLERY – SWOLLEN AIR (cassette by Tripticks) *
EVAN LINDORFF-ELLERY – CHURCH RECORDINGS FROM MONHEGAN (cassette by Full Spectrum Records)
MODELBAU – BANDEINDER (cassette, private) *

Categories
Performances

EMPAC’s Fall Season Announced

Source: Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center.

This year, EMPAC’s signature 220,000-square foot building, which foregrounds creative experimentation by giving artists access to some of the most sophisticated and cutting edge technologies in the field, celebrates its 15-year anniversary. Although EMPAC’s curatorial program pre-dates the building’s historic opening in 2008, this is the fifteenth year that artists, researchers, and audiences have come together under one roof to explore the boundaries of art, science, and technology.

Salon Mondialité (September 22) is vocalist and electronic musician Miho Hatori’s exploration of memory, identity, and colonization inspired by the work of philosopher Edouard Glissant. Presented as an experimental talk-show, the work substitutes segments with sound stories, combining composed and improvised music with guest performances against the backdrop of a video installation. Hatori is a Japanese-born and New York City-based musician who gained popularity in the 1990s with the band Cibo Matto.

Moving away from Large Language Models (LLMs) towards what the artist calls “Small Barbie Models (SMBs),” Evidence of Labor: State of the Kitchen (September 29) is an EMPAC-commissioned dance work by artists Michelle Ellsworth and Satchel Spencer that considers different forms of labor. The work features three dancers on stage interacting with two sets of wooden kitchens and an original Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) based on choreographic and performance habits. It attempts to duplicate ChatGPT’s labor–to better understand the ethics involved in outsourcing the act of writing and meaning-making–and functions as a Reverse Turing Test, a prototype for life After-AI (AA), and a birth canal.

The following month, EMPAC presents Plasmatic Music (October 6), a concert in two parts with pieces by the late iconoclastic Romanian-French composer Horațiu Rădulescu. A pioneer of “spectral music,” Rădulescu explores the volatility and mysticism of sound itself, creating a wholly unexpected, provocative, and visceral experience for the listener. The program features performer/composers Sam Dunscombe (clarinet and electronics), James Rushford (organ), and Rebecca Lane (flute).

Elemental View (October 24) is a work in six movements by pioneering composer Ellen Fullman for her Long String Instrument and The Living Earth Show. The immense instrument installation, with its precisely tuned and configured 136 strings, takes full advantage of EMPAC’s Concert Hall acoustics, filling the space with its glistening atmosphere and giving the audience the experience of bathing in the sound of the instrument’s immersive and expansive resonance. This performance continues The Living Earth Show’s multi-season residency at EMPAC. TLES is an electroacoustic duo who pushes the boundaries of technical and artistic possibility while amplifying voices, perspectives, and bodies that the classical music tradition has often excluded.

The Shifting Center exhibition (offsite October 28-29 and onsite November 3-18) is the culmination of EMPAC’s ambitious, multi-year curatorial project on architecture, acoustics, and the politics of sound in museums and contemporary art exhibitions that opens to the public this Fall. For the first time in a decade, EMPAC’s concert halls, stages, and studios—which are tuned for acoustically-differentiated experiences of sounding and listening—are converted into a series of exhibition spaces where existing and newly commissioned works of sculpture, moving-image, and sound are presented throughout and beyond its walls. Artists include Tania Candiani, Padmini Chettur and Maarten Visser, Beatriz Cortez, Guillermo Escalón and Igor de Gandarias, Hugo Esquinca, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Micah Silver, and Clarissa Tossin among others.

EMPAC’s fall 2023 season also includes public tours, screenings, and conversations with future artists in residence, including composers/performers Jesse Marino and Antonia McIntosh-Barnett; choreographer Alexis Blake; and artist and preeminent scholar on disability studies Petra Kuppers. The season closes with a film screening In Pursuit: Short Films curated by EMPAC’s newly appointed assistant curator Katherine Adams. The series of short films centers on forms of furtive mobility–chase, exilic evasion, urgent travel, and outlawed movement–such as Miko Revereza’s Distancing.

Categories
Performances

Coming to Seattle

Source: Wayward Music Series.

Josephine Foster, Lori Goldston, Natasha El-Sergany
Thu. June 8, 8 PM; $20 in advance / at door

This isn’t technically a Wayward show but it’s at the Chapel this week and definitely of interest to Wayward fans. You should go. Admission at the door is sliding scale, no one turned away for lack of funds. Follow the links for more info.

Right Brain presents: Amy Denio, Bill Horist, Levitation, New World 3
Sat. June 10, 8 PM; $10 – $15 at the door

Right Brain Records showcases some of Seattle’s finest improvisers: vocalist/saxophonist Amy Denio, guitarist Bill Horist, Levitation (Don Berman, drums; Carol J Levin, electric harp; Matt Benham, guitar/electronics; Dick Valentine, sax), and world music-tinged New World Trio (Kenny Mandell, woodwinds/percussion; Gabe Skoog, percussion; Mike Connor, sax).

Categories
General

Kyiv’s New Music Scene Today

Source: Musicology Now. This article is about a year old but still relevant.

A big part of what Andrusyk alludes to by “a very happy and full life” is her dream, realized over the past ten years, to make Kyiv an exciting center for new music. In 2012, she co-founded, together with Eugene Shimalsky, a music organization named Ukho (The Ear), which has since presented more than seven hundred works of contemporary classical music from around the world. Having moved from Kyiv to New York in 2010, I paid annual visits to Ukraine. My favorite of Ukho’s projects—a series of performances called Architecture of Voice—reminded me of some of the most exciting site-specific events organized by the Lincoln Center and the Guggenheim Museum.

Categories
AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: The Lonely Bell – Ghost Town Burning; Leonard Donat – Tremors Today (Blackjack Illuminist Records)

The Lonely Bell hangs somewhere on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. For this beautiful, bewitching album, he (real name Ali Murray) first creates presence in order to portray absence, the unease of failed community. Over two, slowly burning twenty-minute pieces, the air remains heavy. However, the subtle rising of a signal on the title track belies the illusion of stasis, while a lone, faraway voice cries out repeatedly within the desolate architecture of “Then the Snow…” Gloomy and austere, Ghost Town Burning can’t help but pull the listener into its sighing void.

Maintaining a similar if more urgent mood, Tremors Today by label head Leonard Donat was released by Blackjack Illuminist Records on the very same day as Ghost Town Burning. While the former peals from the abyss, Tremors Today hurtles us into it. Here, the air is corrosive. Though low and slow, it has an admonitory stridency. It is an accomplished work of dark ambience, beautiful in fact, save for the uncomfortable fact that its plotline is our current climate disaster.

Stephen Fruitman

Categories
Reviews

The Best Contemporary Classical on Bandcamp: May 2023

Source: Bandcamp Daily.

The taxonomy of contemporary classical music—new music, contemporary music, whatever you want to call it—is a thorny issue. But every month, we’ll take a look at some of the best composer-driven music to surface here on Bandcamp, that which makes room for electronic experimentation, improvisation, and powerful takes on old classics.

Categories
Reviews

The Free Jazz Collective Reviews

Source: The Free Jazz Collective.

Zhao Cong and Zhu Wenbo – Were some sound days, one separately be placed (Ftarri, 2023)

Faith Brackenbury, John Pope, Paul Dunmall, and Tony Bianco – Sentient Beings (Off, 2023)

Alister Spence/ Tony Buck – Mythographer (Alister Spence Music, 2023)

Natural Information Society – Since Time Is Gravity (Eremite, 2023)

Steve Swell’s Fire Into Music – For Jemeel: Fire from the Road (Rogue Art, 2023)

KVL – Vol 2 (Astral Spirits, 2023)

Categories
General

William Parker Interview (Live at Big Ears Festival) 

Source: WYPR.

Bassist William Parker has spent 50 years at the heart of jazz, as a collaborator with many of the music’s greats and as a composer and bandleader in his own right. In this episode, recorded live at the Big Ears Festival in 2023, he discusses how Duke Ellington, Don Cherry and Cecil Taylor shaped his work.