sound & video
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.
Sequential transformations, the slow revealing of hidden sonic events, linking of sonic layers, re-recording inside resonant objects and room tone. Sound as invention through disorientation (uva / grape / wine / disorientation / mutation = ova / fertility / emergence of form). Sources include ceramic rods, bowed autoharp, metal chain, small glasses suspended in water, and recordings of wind in the Columbia River Gorge, WA.
Continuous pitched sounds with an undercurrent of white noise. Air on the edges of tone, amplified through a compositional process of massing and layering, the incorporation of room tone and re-recording of environments. Sonic shadows – sound as a casting of color or dark, the slowly unfolding shade of space within a field of time, “night music”. Sources include blown bottles, pump organ, voice, bowed autoharp, piano, recorder, sagbut, and field recordings of fireworks, crickets, caves on the Oregon coast, a rotating electric sign in the cobblestone streets of Maribor, Slovenia, boiling water.
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.
Organic and synthetic materials in collision, the layering of divergent acoustic spaces, condensed structures, jumbled sounds and dynamic swells. Basic materials are infinitely transformable, evolving and rearranging through cycles of growth and decay. Sources include bowed wire, harmonica, cello, dry leaves, glass shards, ceramic rods, paper, hand cymbals, small bells, rocks in a wooden box, metal rods, cardboard tubes, tuned cowbells, mechanical viola, seeds on tin foil, bowed glass, recordings in a resonant stairwell.
Rubbed, dragged and scraped sounds of friction, with micro-pitch artifacts, acoustic reverberations and massed tones. Basic materials are molecular clouds of varying densities, abrasion is a method of activating resonant qualities, instigating a porosity between the surface and the ‘inside’ of materials, the intermingling of molecular “clouds”. Sources include large-diameter glass tubes, wood, large sheets of tempered-glass, bricks, plastic bucket, wine glass, metal bowl, chimes, air organ.
Seth Nehil 