A1-C8 is the sixth installment of the Modulisme platform’s series of releases for collaborations between sound artists. For this project electronics artist and composer Martin Eriksson created A1-C8, a five part graphic score comprising three pages, each of which contains eight sections. The score’s appearance leaves much to the performer’s judgment: its notation consists of jagged, wavy, and broken lines of varying lengths and densities that can be interpreted in any of a number of ways. Once Ericksson composed the score he gave it to cellist My Hellgren and trumpeter Håkan Strandhag to transcribe into concrete musical gestures. During the performance, Eriksson interacted with the acoustic instruments in real time, using a modular synthesizer to modify their sounds in order to push their voices into unconventional territories. The result is an often sparse polyphony in which cello and trumpet lines are broken up, duplicated, extended in time, and overlapped individually and together, the instruments’ timbres are alternately distorted and left in their natural state. Both acoustic musicians give Eriksson much to work with, and he handles it with an admirable clarity. Hellgren’s frequent use of extended technique moves the cello into provocative sonic spaces, in relation to which Strandhag’s more conventional trumpet playing offers a bracing contrast.
Daniel Barbiero
Avant Music News 