sound & video
Rustling and jumbled textures, rhythmic rolling, ideophones, free exchange, blind layering, room tone, micro-envelopes, “creatureality”, re-recording, auditory fatigue. Sources include fabric, pebbles, various drums and rattles, upright bass, a down comforter, grass, tin foil, radio static, glass spheres, bowed wires, scraped autoharp, voice, moose call, recorder, tuning fork, feedback, oscillator, cello, hammer dulcimer, field recordings of graveyards and parks in Portland OR.
Jagged sounds, abrupt breaks, propulsive tempos, sudden pauses, re-use of scraps, digital distortion, spun speakers, banned fades, improvisation, live recordings as raw material, multiple exchanges. Sound as the scent of perfume left in a space after a person exits. Sources include upright bass, plucked piano, sine tones, wine glasses, leaves, grass, bowed metal, stairwell railing, blown organ pipe, voice, jaw harp, drums, church organ, and recordings of a plaza in Boston MA, a canoe in water, a refrigerator, fireworks, a straw broom, galleries and lobbies of the Met, a windmill in Maribor Slovenia, a train station in Limoge France.
Location recordings, continuous abrasion, open environments, compositional drift, site-specific improvisation and free exchange. Sources include rubbed organ pipes, trees, bowed wires, metal objects, wood pile, glass jugs, blown bottles, forests in Estonia and Finland, resonant oil tanks, wind.
Stria is the companion album to Confluence.
Sources include voice, bowed metal, pebbles, motor-driven instruments, beans in wooden and plastic containers, a worn copy of Alvin Lucier’s Music on a Long Thin Wire, and recordings of fire, a field in the Columbia Gorge, microphones dragged through grass, and previous sounds as broadcast on radios in rooms and on streets in Koper, Slovenia.
Audio ‘chopping’, mutual destruction, improvisation, live recordings as raw material, free exchange. Sources include grass, beans, pebbles, small cassette players, blown bottles, flute, reeds, oboe, piano, bowed wires, metal objects, wood pieces, and recordings of crickets, frogs, crows, streets and temples in Tokyo and Kyoto, the botanical gardens in Paris, a wooden ladder.
Confluence is the companion album to Stria.
CD, 50 min.
Intransitive Recordings INTO22
Composed 1998 – 2000, released 2002From the liner notes:
(Particle [Cell] > Wave [Body])
The following piece Confluence is the result of a continual two-year collaboration and exchange. Significant not only as final compositions, these pieces are nearly complete documents of our individual and collective output relating to sound experimentation, recording and composition during this period. Although the listener in the end is left to experience the acoustic presence created by these works, a survey of the elements that comprise what one hears along with some general information concerning our intent is presented here. Our primary thread of research over this time was to study evolutionary patterns of sound dynamics through various methods of live generation and recorded mediums that focus on multiplications and groupings. While this has been one of the fundamental bases of our work since the beginning, in these compositions a concentrated effort was made to explore how our artistic and conceptual ideas of sound experimentation affected the physical, perceptual influence of intensive listening. Much of this has to do with the idea of resonance; the phenomenon of natural vibrations that give rise to intensified or stable structures within sound bodies and fields.
Seth Nehil 