Composer, Greg Hooper, has been busy with a set of fantastic phonography works. His latest is titled “Across the Road.” For this piece Greg meticulously recorded the construction work on a house across the street from his own once a week at the same time for 28 weeks. “Across the Road” is mesmerizing and wonderfully unique.   Its available at Bandcamp on the label Analogous-Sounds.

Here is the official description of the work:

A field recording of a house being built across the road. I recorded an hour every Tuesday morning (at about 10:00 am) for 28 weeks. Each week provides – I think – 20 secs of both background and individual spot sound. The background was developed by taking a representative sample from that week, taking the FFT randomising the phase, then taking the IFFT, to give a noise sample that represented the spectrum (but not the dynamical structure) of that week. This was then convolved with representative sound of whatever the activity of that week was. Overlaid on top of that are spot sounds that seemed to me to represent the normal sounds of that week. The density of the sounds is determined by a drawing the builder made of the activity cycle across the entire building period.

A composer I’ve come to know from the NetNewMusic forum, Adam Kondor, has some very nice works up at his NNM page. His works are thought-provoking, smart and purtee as well. A chronology of his works –> here.

AAM would like to give a big shout out to Dave Seidel and his new release today, August 10, 2009,  of “Elementals” on the net label Stasisfield.  From Stasisfield’s website:

Peterborough, New Hampshire’s Dave Seidel offers a microtonal ode to the four primal elements. Water, fire, earth and air are represented here by elegant synthetic sounds and digitally manipulated field recordings. Working primarily in Csound, Seidel sculpts swathing drones and digital flutters into monolithic representations of his natural subjects. Technicians will undoubtedly consult Seidel’s notes included in the album’s digital packagingpersonal website for details of these tracks’ construction, while aesthetes will simply lose themselves in their overwhelming beauty.

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You see what happens when you read my blog?  Things happen!  Congratulations Marc Chan. Keep up the great “works.”

From the New York Times, “Of the new interludes the most inviting was Mr. Chan’s Interlude II, a study in repeating, slowly morphing figures built around chimelike tintinnabulations and ending up in a chromatic Minimalist swirl. “

No surprise this entry goes under “notices.” Every amaranth blog should take a pit stop at this mention and quite a few do thankfully.  Kyle Gann’s blog PostClassic does wonders for music in a historic sense to be realized in the future as well as recognizing present, living composers.  Gann, arguably one of the most relevant artists of our era; a great composer in his own right.

Paul Bailey of PBE once told OC Weekly after being asked if his band was more like an orchestra than anything else:  “Fuck the orchestra.  Let’s burn that puppy down and start over.  The orchestra’s proper place is the museum.”

I”ll go even one step further.  The symphony hall is a museum and the orchestra a glass case, the selected works open to viewing.  One or two exceptions to the rule doesn’t change this fact, which is why I laugh just a little when composers complain about the injustice served to great modern and contemporary (1920 – present) composers who are rarely played at the symphony hall.  Those who buy season tickets aren’t looking for a new experience or enlightenment.  Just the opposite, they are there to observe fossils, composer dinosaurs, who unknowingly claimed their spot in the league of dead composers decades and decades ago.  The symphony does have its place beyond the museum, however; and that’s when its striking up brilliant music for theater and film (not to mention all those horrible scores).

So as you can imagine, nothing thrills me more than new music composers/performers who think outside the box and do something about what’s really happening in the amaranth scene instead of beating against a wall in a futile attempt to bring their genius to the masses, magically converting the graveyard into a live scene once again.  Playing clubs, churches, high school stages, outdoors, and from their domiciles.  Wait, what was that last one?  From their homes you say?  That is correct.  How many performances would Satie have put on with this technology, you ask?  I can’t answer that, but probably quite a few.

There is a wave of improvisers and composers hitting the streaming online video circuit, (your hero included ), live looping, soloing, inventing, and bending/reshaping what an amaranth concert is.  Of course its up to the listener what level of sound quality they wish to attain, the performer is set to give you stereo – CD quality.   In essence, the price of a couple tickets to the symphony hall, parking, and dinner/drinks afterward will probably eclipse the price of a couple quality speakers.  But that’s nonsense anyway considering a nice sound system is fairly commonplace.

This brings me to Steve Moyes, who literally knocked me off my ass the last two times I attended his Ustream performances.  The first via Cello live looping which shook my whole flat to his last performance on the electric guitar which I have nicknamed his Fantasia.  A nice feature for these performances is the chat box function.  You can /clap /hoot and /holler all you want without disturbing the performer.  I shouted out during Steve’s performance “you’re possessed and that last note just elevated my chair off the floor!”  Of course Steve wasn’t interrupted by this and the other listeners had the benefit of my keen observation.  Yes, it was a Fantasia.

At one point between performances, Steve lifted up a cased record.  Those in attendance quickly compared notes on what we thought Steve was going to do with it.  Scratch?  Play along?  But much to our delight, Steve took the album out and proceeded to give a workshop on ingenuity and brilliant craftsmanship and I’ll just say it, GENIUS, by playing the guitar with the record.

Here is this masterful performance (start it at the 14 minute mark due to a glitch in sound).

A reminder from AAM that Steve Layton’s new album “Vision” is out. I had a listen today and I’m pleased to report that it has all the Steve Layton hallmarks. Grand, playful, dark, surreal and inventive with deep textures and lots of treats in the way of poetry readings and unconventional sampling from small metal balls falling through pachinko machines in a Japanese game parlor to the single recording of a honeybee. Each work is described in detail here.

It just occurred to me that my release of Bats in the Belfry was fairly close to Steve’s and both albums have quite a bit in common (both employing the digital piano roll), although the approaches are substantively different. As Steve notes: “While some may consider all of this to be simply “machine music”, I think of it as nothing of the kind. The score is composed in every way identically to how we composers have done so for centuries with pen and paper; but in addition the score records my own “touch” in every note, something not possible before the coming of digital sequencers. And the synthesizer is no more a “machine” than a violin is. Both are truly instruments, each designed to create and channel vibrations from within their body into the air and ear, all of it the impetus of a human agency.”

While it was my aim to create a mechanism which I imagined succumbed to flesh at moments and at other moments forgoing a human touch altogether, taken over by a rusty, old machine, Steve took care to create beautiful works with an imprint of the human hand.

Steve Layton’s Vision is available through numerous online outlets.  Click the album pic for a direct link to iTunes.

NiWo