The Rain in Maine b/w Two Girls finds the artist capturing his aural environment, partaking in song with a friend.

- EL

The kernel of ?M Fra* is a set of files that were generated by Marco Pasini’s musika software from a dataset of audio files by Ian M Fraser and myself. Like teratomas — rare tumors that can sprout fully formed teeth, hair, bone, or other somatic structures — the output of this system featured familiar musical figures jutting haphazardly out of a more primitive, inchoate sonic mass. They register less as hybridizations of Ian’s work and mine than as para-musical found objects: stylistic markers from the corpus of royalty-free techno music used to train musika are audible, distended and compressed by the opaque compositional logic of the generative adversarial network, while the timbral dimension was characterized by a fuzzy indefiniteness that gave the impression of distance, that the sound was partially inaccessible due to the interposition of some occluding medium, never fully present but merely overheard in its state of virtual elsewhereness. These files were subjected to various source separation tools, each of which imposed its own spectral gestalt. Although the term source separation implies a genealogical protocol, a retrograde movement toward earlier, antecedent elements, the encounter between the musika products — a sonic object generated holistically rather than by summing discrete instrumental tracks — and the source separation algorithms yields novel entities, false histories ontologically posterior to that of which they are the putative “source.” By recombining stems from different source separation methods, the pattern recognition function of the various machine listening paradigms is subverted: new patterns emerge as a result of the juxtaposition of non-complementary stems, while reciprocal regions are riddled with gaps and spectral remainders.

- RMF

musika by Marco Pasini

demucs by Alexandre Défossez

RAVE by Antoine Caillon

Mastered by A.F. Jones

No Please Stop Don’t

No please stop don’t

please stop no please

stop no don’t stop

please no stop please

no stop don’t no

please stop no stop

don’t please no

stop please no don’t

stop please stop no

please no stop

don’t stop no please

stop please stop

stop no stop don’t

no don’t no stop

don’t please don’t

no stop don’t no

please no stop no

don’t please no stop

stop please don’t

no please no

stop no don’t no

please stop no

please no don’t no

don’t no stop please

no don’t please no

stop please stop

don’t no please no

don’t stop please no

stop no please don’t

stop don’t please no

please stop don’t

please don’t no stop

stop don’t please

no stop please no

don’t please no

stop please don’t no

no don’t no stop

please don’t stop

no please don’t

no please stop

stop don’t please

stop no don’t

please don’t no

no stop don’t

no please don’t

please stop

don’t stop please

don’t no please

please no

don’t no stop please

stop no don’t stop

don’t please stop no.

Need Some Bright Turn

Need some bright turn

turn need some bright

turn need some

some bright need

need turn bright

turn bright some need

some bright some turn

need turn some

some need some bright

some turn need turn

bright need turn bright

bright turn need some

need bright

turn some bright

need bright turn some

turn some need

some turn some need

some need some

turn some turn

bright turn

need turn need

some bright turn

need some bright need

some need some

need turn bright some turn

need bright need

need turn bright

some bright some

need some turn

bright need some

some need

bright need

bright some need turn

turn need bright

turn need

turn bright some need

bright need turn some

bright some bright turn

turn need some turn

some bright

need turn

some bright need turn

some turn

need turn

need bright need turn

need some need turn

turn some

turn

bright some bright

bright turn need

need some need

some need turn bright.

Upon Looking At It

Upon looking at it

it at upon looking

at looking it upon

it looking at

it at looking

upon at looking it

it at

it upon it

looking at it

looking at

upon at it looking

at looking upon

upon it

upon it at looking

upon at looking

it looking at upon

upon looking

at it looking

at it upon

at upon at

at it

it looking

upon it upon

at upon looking

looking upon

upon it at upon it

looking it at upon at

it upon looking at

at it at upon

it looking at upon at

at upon it at

looking upon it at upon

upon looking at

it looking upon at it looking

looking upon at upon it

at looking

it looking it

it looking

it upon

looking at it upon

at it upon looking at

looking it looking

at looking it at

upon it looking

upon looking upon it

at upon it looking it

looking at upon at looking

looking upon at upon

at it upon it

upon it looking it

at it looking upon

at looking.

Yes You Have To

Yes you have to

have you to yes

to yes have you

you yes to

have yes to have

you yes to you

have you yes

have yes to

you yes have to

yes to you have

have yes you to

you yes to have

you to have yes

yes to you have

to you to yes

yes have yes

to you have you

yes you to you

have to you

to have to you

yes you yes to

have you yes

you have to yes

have you have yes

have yes to

you yes to have

you have yes

to you to

have you to have

have yes you

to have to yes

yes you to

have yes

to have yes

to you to

yes you have you

yes have

you yes to you

have yes have

yes you to you

have to yes you

have you have

yes have yes you

yes to you have you

yes have to you

to have yes

to have you

have to yes

you to you have

yes have to yes to

you have

have yes you to.

I’m So Very Mad

I’m so very mad

so mad I’m

mad so I’m very

very I’m so very so

mad I’m mad

I’m very so mad

very mad so I’m

mad very so

so mad I’m very I’m

mad I’m so very

very so

I’m so I’m

so I’m very I’m

mad so

so very mad

mad I’m so

so I’m mad very

I’m mad so I’m so

so very I’m very so

so I’m so very so

mad I’m mad so

I’m very

mad I’m so I’m

so mad I’m mad

very mad so

I’m very so

very so I’m

so mad very

very I’m so I’m

so mad so

so very mad

so very so I’m mad

I’m so mad so very

I’m very mad so mad

I’m mad

so I’m mad

I’m very so I’m

mad so

mad very

I’m very

so mad I’m very

so very I’m so very

mad I’m very so

so I’m

I’m

very so mad am very

very mad I’m very so

so very mad very I’m

mad I’m mad I’m very

mad I’m so mad so

very so very

mad so very I’m so.

Have Been Going Again

Have been going again

going again been have

been have going again

have been have going

been going have going

again going have been

been have going been

going been going have

have going have been

going have been have

going been again have

have again been going

been have going have

have been have been

been going been have

been going been going

going have going have

have going been

been have going again have

going have been going

been have

going again have been have

again have going again

been again going

again going again been

again having been going again

have been going

going again have again

have going again going

again been have again

been again have

going been again

have been

have going again been

again going have going been

been again have going

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have again going been have

going been going been

been

going have

going been

again going been have

have

have again been

have again going been again

again have been

again going have again

going again have going

been again going have

again going have going

have been again.

What happens when the ear is presented with ten independent melodic lines? Or twenty? Or a hundred? In a series of sonic-perceptual experiments over the past few years, I’ve found that beyond about eight independent melodic lines, we lose the capacity for perceptual discrimination and begin to hear nothing but mush. But if we go further still (between about 20 to 50 lines) one of two things happens: either we hear more mush (I.e., noise), or something clicks and the ear begins to gestalt things into groups. Et voilà: melodic-like shapes begin to emerge from the morass.

Our auditory systems are constantly doing this kind of analytical work. They do it every time we hear a phoneme or a note, for example, by fusing the many spectra into a cognizable thing. We also do it when we listen to music, separating out the various layers (drums, bass, guitar, and voice in rock music, for example).

Even so, I am surprised every time it happens: when going beyond about 20 lines yields something new, something with a kind of cognizable shape. Usually in a way that’s quasi-improvised (and using some kind of pitch set or simple harmonic motion), the shift from ten incoherent lines to the uncanny popping Gestalts of 40 lines takes my breath away. When it happens. It often does not, and I end up with something ragged and ugly that I erase immediately. Part of what I’m working on now is understanding what works and what doesn’t. The little audio piece in this Lateral Addition issue was my first ever attempt with this compositional process. (I recorded it in my lockdown living room on the 2nd of April, 2020.) Since then, I’ve done many other pieces, and I have advanced the process quite a bit, but there’s something about the freshness of this first attempt that I still find perceptually thrilling.

In the version here, I’ve attempted to make something out of the little fragment of 20+ independent melodic lines. My friend and collaborator Jim Sykes plays wonderfully chaotic drums over the thing.

I see this attempt as part of an approach to music composition (and to music generally) that I call perceptualism. The claim of perceptualism (and I will elaborate on this soon in various places) is that Western music has historically been divorced from questions of perception. This is so both in terms of making music (composition, performance, etc.) and theorizing music. But what do I mean when I say that music is divorced from questions of perception? Surely musicians care about nothing other than how the sound they produced is perceived? And surely academic types do nothing but try to explain how music is perceived and how it affects listeners? To some extent, yes, these assumptions are true. But we also know that historically Western music has had a deeply idealist or even mathematical thrust. Pythagoras’ hammers were merely abstractions rather than sounding bodies. The birth of “modern” instrumental music ca. 1800 also traded primarily in abstractions: of pure and organic form. The listener is often less than an afterthought.

I propose a perceptualist music: an approach to music making that engages questions of auditory perception directly.

I said that Western music has historically been divorced from questions of perception. What I have in mind can be expressed if we split that history into several trajectories.

1. Since the 18th century and the sedimentation of homophony, perception is mostly simple and unambiguous. Of course, there may be types of ambiguity at larger structural levels (the “hypermetrical” level, for example), or in other ways. But in the vast majority of music since ca. 1800 it is clear what the listener is supposed to hear: a melodic line (marked off by timbre and other aspects) and supporting harmonies. The listener knows what the melody is. In this sense, perception is not a real issue in this kind of music because we know what is meant to be perceived and, to a large extent, how. Music is pure perception: perceiving a melody with its harmonic support. This includes various emotions and affects.
2. By contrast, most “complex” music of the 20th and 21st centuries does not bother with the question of perception in another way. It explores other things. There will continue to be debates about whether it is possible to hear the tone rows in Schoenberg. And complex theoretical operations will continue to be developed to explain how the processes in Babbitt or Ferneyhough are “perceived.” But any honest person will admit that the question, “What exactly do you hear in this music?” is beside the point. The issue here is not that these composers do or do not “care” if anyone listens, but rather that the relationship between the musical structure and the human perceptual/cognitive apparatus are divorced from one another. We hear all kinds of things in Babbitt’s music, but the music is not designed to be registered in terms of the question of what an individual listener perceives at any given sitting.
3. The same is true of pre-1800 polyphony from J.S. Bach backwards to early organum. Going far too quickly over an enormous corpus, this music is not aimed at an external listener who might parse out a coherent perception from the whole. Think about 14th or 15th century polyphony (Machaut, Dufay, etc.) and its intricate interweaving of vocal lines. When I asked a prominent historian of this music how one is meant to perceive it, he answered that it’s a “black box” and that the question is not meaningful. I tend to agree. Certainly, the question of textual intelligibility was a huge one, as exemplified by the simplification of polyphony by the Council of Trent in the mid-16th century. It may be the case that listeners were meant to focus on individual vocal lines in order to apprehend the words. (Pedantic side note: Even in cases where to the modern listener it may sound impossible to disentangle melodic lines, musicologists have recently shown that in Medieval acoustic settings vocal lines might have been more easily tracked. See Anna Zayaruznaya’s “Intelligibility Redux” [2017].) Even so (and to riff on David Yearsley), the “meaning of counterpoint,” the meaning of the relationship between different vocal-melodic lines, was entirely something other than a perceptual issue—it was a mirroring of cosmic order in an earlier period, and in the time of Bach the intermingling of melodies was likened to the way an alchemist mixed metals in an attempt to produce gold. (A possible counter-example: Bregman offers a potentially genuine, if not especially rich, example of Baroque perceptualism: “Composers in the Baroque period (approximately 1600-1750) frequently wrote music in which individual instruments rapidly alternated between a high and a low register, giving the effect of two intertwined melodic lines (‘virtual polyphony’ or ‘compound melodic line’). While the performances were typically not fast enough to fully segregate the high and low melodic lines, it still produced a certain degree of segregation.” He then offers an example by Telemann as evidence.)

If we take these three trajectories as broadly paradigmatic of the main poles of Western music history, we see that perception is not an issue.

There was a moment in the 1960s and 70s when Western music took a near perceptualist turn. Buoyed by ethnographic analyses of non-Western music (especially East African and Indonesian music), the composer Steve Reich, the music ethnographer Gerhard Kubik, and the psychologist Albert Bregman simultaneously and independently developed Gestalt (or Gestalt-like) theories of perceptual grouping in music. Similar ideas, perhaps less ethnographically-oriented, are evident in work by Maryanne Amacher and James Tenney.

My compositional work takes stock of this moment in music history, trying to recuperate it and radicalize it. All I really want to do, at least at this stage, is to make music that sounds genuinely interesting. No theorization can produce interesting-sounding music, but at the same time I feel that we have tried too long to make interesting-sounding music without sufficient theorization. Beginning on a perceptualist footing is, I believe, a step in one possibly fruitful direction. We have many possible places to look in the past to help us, should we wish to. If not, we can continue making music that either offers itself nakedly, or is totally indifferent, to the listener. (The third option, which I believe is possibly the one taken by many interesting composers today, is to intuitively find some middle-ground. But intuition may have run its course.)

I don’t think I have succeeded in any very substantial way with this study, and I recognize the mismatch between the grandiose claims of this text and the slightness of the music. That said, perceptualism is not one thing, and I see this LA posting as an invitation to further creative exploration in this area.

- GS

The following audio-work is my first attempt of a sound (or tuning in) meditation, without using verbal language. I have been looking for ways to reduce discursive elements as much as possible for such a practice, as I am in an environment where most of the people around me have a different mother tongue.

I also think a sound meditation is both an empirical and intimate experience, and I often struggle to find the right terminology conveying my own auditive experiences.

This piece is called « Tuning In » as it is meant to be an introduction to a solo violin program I am releasing as an album next year. Before the music starts I wanted to propose a moment for the listeners at home to « clean their ears »* from daily life’s rumble (I am speaking from a city-life perspective), so they can be receptive to music again.

At first, I wanted to use sea sounds entangled with violin fragments. But two « technical » issues occurred to me : I don’t live close to the sea, and I am not a skillful field recorder.

I then tried to recreate a seascape with tools I felt comfortable with: a violin, a bow and a laptop.

*I recommend listening to this track with headphones, taking the time to adjust the volume as necessary.

- CL

In 2019 I began composing a series of pieces based on permutations of musical pitches. Starting with eight numbered pitches, I created a few simple rules and began sketching out “riffs” or — if you want to be fancy about it — “tone rows”. There are two voices and the music is primarily in octaves, although at certain points the “algorithm” flips and new pitch relationships are established. Eight pitches allow for 40,320 possible sequences. An alternate version of this piece might be to play through every possible permutation. It would take some time to get through them all, so it might be better to just imagine it. The present recordings were made with electronic oscillators, but this music could theoretically be performed on any two instruments.

- NH

Schema I-IV individual tracks in playlist

Schema III

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wood, water, stone, metal


some questions:


working with objects in states of transformation, something moving or being moved slowly toward becoming something else, how do we listen to industrial and elemental entanglements?

places understood as nature are often sites of intervention. when and where does an ethical aesthetics of intervention begin and end?

in a coastal forest after it burns, at an oxygenated lake being overgrown by algae,
outside a cement plant at the edge of a quarry, what sense of duration do we perceive?

what changes occur when we listen within and when we listen without?


a note:


a background in percussion and improvisation informs my approach to field recording and working with sounding objects. this work is both documentation and interaction.



kevin corcoran, 2022

In March 2021, after two silent years of pandemic, I began collecting chants from around the world for my new acousmatic work. Exhausted by the long period of isolation and lack of contact, my artistic goal with this project was to bring together the voices of people from different countries, cultures and religions and unite them in my musical composition. In the promotional video I posted on my social media channels, I asked for audio recordings with a smartphone and received 26 songs that I used as source material for the piece. The audio files ranged from intimate solo recordings made in a bedroom, to polyphonic folk songs and chants professionally recorded in a studio, to songs accompanied by various instruments. As I listened to the recordings, I realized that my task as a composer was to find ways to connect the voices that were recorded in different acoustic environments, with different keys, tempos, and languages, and to create a sound world in which they could all coexist. Considering the time in which the recordings were made and the work was composed, I consider this piece a collective prayer, hence the title ლოცვა (Lotsva).

The first version of the piece premiered in Oslo on September 9 and subsequently toured other Norwegian cities and international festivals. In the meantime, I kept receiving new recordings, so I added a new contribution from a different country at almost every performance. The final version of the piece was presented at Kulturkirken Jakob as an 8-channel sound installation as part of VoxLAB VårFEST.

- MG

Mastering: Balint Laczko

Format: 2D Ambisonics / Binaural

Duration: 16 minutes

Year of composition: 2021

Commissioned by Ny Musikks Komponistgruppe

Contributors:

Annie Björkman, Sweden

Aine Eva Nakamura, Japan

Heidi Skjerve, Norway

Line Souza, Brazil

Gyrid Nordal Kaldestad, Norway

Nigar Gahramanova, Azerbaijan

Åshild Hagen, Norway

Katy Pinke, Israel

Supriya Nagarajan, India

Zosha Warpeha, USA

Silva de Waard, Netherlands

Zoe Perret, France

Verena Merstallinger, Austria

Diego (surname anonymous), Argentina

Tamo Nasidze, Georgia

Falk Rößler, Germany

Ensemble IALONI, Nino Naneishvili, Georgia

Elvic Kongolo Birkebein, Congo

Małgorzata Olejniczak, Poland

David Zurabiani, Georgia

Sajidah Ahmed, Bangladesh

Andrea Silvia Giordano, Italy

Balint Laczko, Hungary

Marija Astromskaitė, Lithuania

Diana Serrao, Portugal

Christopher Manning, US

this computer generated sound is the simulation of something i don't know

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- TU

During the month of November pantea and Leonie engaged in a daily conversation. The artists never met each other in person, but had gotten an impression of one another during a presentation and short conversation online.

A one-hour track traveled back and forth between Tehran and The Hague - the artists took turns adding audio fragments to fill this hour. Bits of conversations, field recordings of the surroundings, special moments and the mundane regularity of daily life, thoughts that cross their minds. pantea underlined these elements with the Tar, and Leonie with a Fender Stratocaster and an original 1950s National Slide Guitar. The track could be filled in chronologically or out of order, vertically or in layers horizontally, in order to produce a tapestry of daily life.

November

Act 1: Roggeveenstraat 180, The Hague, Kitchen

Act 2: Soundwalk, from Golshandoust to Fadak Park, Tehran

Act 3: Community Garden “Het Welpje”, The Hague

Act 4: Construction site in Narmak and home in 92nd Square, Narmak, Tehran

Act 5: Suezkade, The Hague

Act 6: Fadaiyane Eslam Park soundwalk with Sonic Tehran group, Tehran

Act 7: Tram 1 from the Peace Palace to Delft

Act 8: Delft Station

Act 9: Gardening in Lavasan, close to Latyan dam lake

Act 10: Apartment Roggeveenstraat 180, The Hague

Act 11: Driving from Pasdaran Street to Narmak, Tehran

Act 12: Corner Roggeveenstraat/Van Spijkstraat, The Hague

Each act represents a place or path in each city where the narrative was recorded. The locations are visualized in these maps: Tehran, The Hague

In 2017 I wrote a piece called Constructed Objects. The piece was the first in an ongoing project of imagining composing or making music as a sort of non-linear sculptural/conceptual project. I wanted to envision sounds as if they were material concepts (even found objects) in space that interrelate, resonate, and co-mingle in rooms. I have both ideas of assemblage or montage here as well as modular constructions.

I then revisited this idea in 2020 with Correspondences. In that project, I wrote a very simple text score based on the concepts I was thinking about in photographic assemblage sculptures I was creating. Each object type in my sculptures was imagined as a rough concept, and each concept would have a hypothetical/theoretical corresponding sound. I then sent the score out to some collaborators to create both sonic and visual realizations. Correspondences helped me realize that I needed all my visual works to have a corresponding sound world and vice versa.

This piece I’m now presenting is the continuation of that whole project. As this venue for sharing is a place for text and sound, I developed a simple text score similar to Correspondences and now have the opportunity to realize the concepts with words and sound rather than objects or images.

///////////////////

And so the stories here are the real objects. They are performative, a form of verbal art. Attention to their formal properties entails a kind of ethnopoetics—not in the usual sense of analyzing the poetics of a non-Western culture, but rather those of a strange mirror, reflecting and distorting the dominant discourses imploding inside an empire.

/////////////////

Once even a private memory circulates—as utterance, narrative, discourse—it becomes social. It escapes ownership and becomes a living, growing, changing thing. Then even those who didn’t have the original experience can still take in and “have” the memory, absorb it as a kind of inner speech—and can alter it, transform it, let it express new, latent meanings that outrun and distort the transparent sense of the original experience.

It is completely discouraging to hold a word in sight, and see it spin around, pair with others, join a constellation, like a string of beads; in fact it escapes you like a ball on a playground; others play with it cheerfully, but what are they playing at, what’s their game? It’s a mystery.

An implied space of permutation. To fashion a space out of lines of thread. Rotating the object time and again to reveal the same object in different orientation. Rolling the thread object like dice to see what results. If the cuboid is rendered via thread, it can even be folded to permit further permutations and renderings.

The Lushei, neighbors of the Mara, believe that earthquakes are caused by the people who live in the lower world shaking the ground to see if anyone is still alive up here. When an earthquake occurs, the Lushei run out of their houses and shout, “Alive! Alive!” so that those below will know, and stop the shaking.

Libraries.

Rivers of living water are to be poured out over the whole world, to ensure that people, like fishes caught in a net, can be restored to wholeness.

Noise has an inchoate shape like weather does – we may measure it but its movements extend beyond any identifiable cause. Noise exceeds its own identity. It is the extreme of difference. Noise is the non-knowledge of meaning, the by-product of economies.

a rock false mansion immediately evaporated in fog which imposed an edge to infinity IT WAS stemming from stellar IT WOULD BE the worst CHANCE Falls the feather rhythmically suspended from the accident to bury itself in original foams not long ago as far as his frenzy leapt to a top withered by the same neutrality of an abyss NOTHING of the memorable crisis or it was the event

There is a beach in Empire, Michigan; one of many. The sand of the beach has been eroded away in recent years by strange weather and different water levels. Now on the beach there is an exposed wall of pure gray clay. The erosion of these beach faces makes room for ‘wildly-out-of-place’ tree species like Mountain Ash or White Cedar.

Senga Nengudi’s Water Compositions.

In terms of image-repertoire, the Photograph (the one I intend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter.

In the plain weave, this intersecting of warp and weft takes place in the simplest possible manner. A weft thread moves alternately over and under each warp thread it meets on its horizontal course from one side of the warp to the other; returning, it reverses the order and crosses over those threads under which it moved before and under those over which it crossed. This is the quintessence of weaving.

Tarkovsky’s concept of time-pressure is like a meteorological time-front that propagates from shot-to-shot and throughout the film, or a cardiopulmonary time-pulse that thrust against the arterial walls of the scenes, bringing temporal oxygenation to the shots and overall meaning to the film-form.

For his book, The Americans, Robert Frank took over 20,000 photographs. 83 were published for the book.

The Robert Venturi designed house known as the Vanna Venturi house (built for his mother) was built between 1962-1964 in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of Philadelphia. The house is an early example of what would come to be known as post-modern architecture. Within the architecture is housed a sort of ‘unity of duality’. Venturi writes: “I like elements which are hybrid rather than "pure," compromising rather than "clear," distorted rather than "straightforward."... I am for messy vitality over obvious unity. I include the non sequitur and proclaim duality.”

The lithium mines in the Atacama desert in Chile provide a quarter of the world's lithium market. The stark mines provide an image of both grid and gradient amongst an arid landscape. The reason of so-called human ‘needs’ are juxtaposed upon an irregular pattern of pools of changing color. The extraction process uses immense amounts of water which lead to a shortage amongst indigenous communities as well as significant biodiversity loss.

Fernand Deligny created a commune for and spent a good deal of his life working with autistic children. He developed a practice of tracing their movements through their lived environments. These tracings were recorded by members of the commune and were eventually dubbed ‘wander lines’.

Due to our visual orientation toward the solid, we often forget, neglect, or dismiss the fact that the eye has a profound biological, historical, and cultural relationship with the liquid. The eye is, like the rest of the human body, made up primarily of water. The mechanics of sight depend on two liquid humors: the aqueous humor and the vitreous humor, which, respectively, nourish the eye and help it maintain its shape.

- MEW

for four gourd instruments and EBows

For over ten years I’ve been designing self-built devices to produce my own experimental soundworlds. These instruments often re-purposed found materials and used contact microphones or magnetic pick-ups as their primary form of amplification. The focus of these instruments was often on producing micro-sounds and sustained tones that were an acoustic equivalence of electronic oscillators.

A few years ago I was on a fellowship at Harvard University and had some limited access to a wood-shop – which happened to be run by Walter Stanul, who had a lifetime's knowledge of building and playing acoustic instruments. One of the things I was interested in developing was moving away from electronic amplification to see if I could make instruments which used the principles of analogue modular synthesis but were realised in the acoustic domain. Inspired by the work of composers Walter Smetak, Tony Conrad and Eliane Radigue – I imported a number of dried large gourds from California and experimented with different methods of converting them into sound objects by attaching different strings, membranes and cavities. What I ended up with was a family of nine instruments – some of them using traditional strings re-purposed from a cello or sitar and others using non-conventional “found” materials like tomato slicers, springs or metal tines. The instruments are then placed on custom stands and activated with ebows and “preparations”. A concert for these incredibly quiet instruments involves several of them, played with ebows; building up microtonal chords and modulations affected by the resonance of the space and preparations which I place on the surface of the instrument. In "Necropolis", I invited my long-time collaborator and friend Richard Youngs to play the gourds with me outdoors, in preparation for an upcoming solo concert I had been invited to play in Rome. I wanted to test out how these instruments would sound when played and recorded outdoors but was afraid that due to their low volume their audibility would be masked by the general hum of the city. We chose carefully then, a place and time, where we hoped for not too much external interference. In this recording you hear pretty much everything that took place that day. Recorded around ten am on a Sunday morning at Glasgow's famous necropolis, sitting on top of the city, we were pleasantly surprised by the balance we managed to achieve between the voicing of the instruments and their surroundings.

Richard did a very minimal "actuality" edit of the proceedings -intentionally revealing our discussion and the clunky sounds of us “searching” for chords (all by ear and experiment). Rather pleasingly the recording also features the sounds of “chance” interventions; sounds that would not ordinarily be present in a typical studio environment. One observes the jet engines of passing aircraft, the footsteps of dog walkers and the comments of passers-by; including one local who said to Richard- "not trying to listen out for the deid are you?"

July 2022

- LF

Program

Preludes, I-IV (0:00-2:56)

I. Prelude I

II. Prelude I

III. Prelude I

IV. Prelude I

Fantasia 1 & 2 (2:57-4:31)

Toccata, I-II (4:32-7:22)

I. “Standard-speed”

II. “Half-speed”

Fretless piano three hands (7:23-10:06)

Fretless piano eight hands (10:07-11:32)

Tuning break

Finale (selected variations) (12:32-14:13)

Performance and composition by Sam Sfirri.

Recorded Summer 2020 and Spring 2021, composed Fall 2021.

Mastered by Taku Unami.

Sam plays a Crown grand piano (150cm) with Capo D’Astro Bar and uses a Marantz PMD221.

Recent piano work by Sam Sfirri on the Madacy Jazz label:

• Pieces for piano two hands, two fingers (two hands), and one finger (2022)
• The Crucible of San, different Sam, and Sam (2020)
• San on Piano (2020)
• The impact of Different Sam (2019)
• Sam on Piano (2018)

I have been carrying pocket journal notebooks with me for a few years. Plain layout, never spiral, soft cardboard cover. Reading across them I revisit situations, occurrences and thoughts from specific moments back in time. Through what I had written down then, I can see where I was and when, who I was, what there was; and how it all resonates with my current being. But the value of the journals lies in what they enable directly: to experience time and space through a particular level of attention that unfolds certain aspects of reality. As in listening. I go to a cafe and write down whatever comes to my mind, whatever goes through my ears, whatever calls out my perception in a certain moment. I sit down, and I wait. Then something turns on, a detail. In my memory or in situ.

Attention highlights the continuity between the parts, and discreet elements appear together as a whole. Or is it rather that there’s only one single essence with infinite variations and infinite reappearances? Revisiting the journals, I noticed remarkable connections between something happening at a time in a specific place, and something else taking place a few months later, in a different town. In one of the notebooks there’s a list:

1/ Hotel in 2ème arrondissement, fire alarm. [4, 9, 10]

2/ 13 rue de la Lune. [3, 5, 6, 7, 8]

3/ Calle de la Luna, 14. [2, 5, 6, 7, 8]

4/ Hotel in Madrid, fire alarm. [1, 9, 10]

5/ Someone at the floor landing at the apartment building in Marseille. [2, 3, 6, 7, 8]

6/ Someone at the floor landing at the hotel. [2, 3, 5, 7, 8]

7/ A familiar face at rue des Rosiers in Paris. [3, 2, 8]

8/ The same face at Réformés square in Marseille. [3, 2, 7]

9/ Fire on the side of the road while driving towards Sainte-Victoire. [1, 4, 10]

10/ Fire around Marseille. Red sky. Smoke and ashes in the air for a week. [1, 4, 9]

11/ A musician’s house. [12, 13]

12/ Take away food on Ralph Av. [11, 13]

13/ A photo. [11, 12]

Same elements, different contexts.

As if, as we change, we keep our gaze directed towards the same thing.

There’s a level of experience that slips away from linguistic convention, and that belongs to the unnamed territory of intuition and acceptance. When encapsulated into words, the experienced material becomes something else. It gets reduced. Fades away.

Through the lines I can see something that I cannot name.

By a sequence of events, the last three numbers on the list resulted in a translucent spherical polyhedron ending up in my hands. If set at the right angle, when rays of light go through it, their colour spectrum is revealed and projected on walls and any other surfaces around. One can also look through it and see a multifaceted vision of the world. It came with a name: “present ball”.

My thoughts combined into an object.

There are also pitches and frequencies written down throughout the pages of the notebooks, as well as descriptions of sounds. I went through recordings and materials that I have collected mostly this year. Along with some of the frequencies from the notebooks, I assigned a sound to each element of the list. And then made combinations following the numbers from the list.

The piece that follows is a reading of the journals, where reading is listening, and not decoding. It’s also a method to avoid human agency in the compositional process, and instead, let the inscrutable logic of the facts be the organisational factor.

- CdA

Northampton, MA

One afternoon in May 2021, amidst rising temperatures and vaccination rates, I went to Child’s Park with my wav recorder. That week, I was feeling stuck and unsure of what to do with my free time and creative projects. I chose the park because it was a place where activity concentrated, which I had noticed during my frequent visits there that spring. Individual people and groups posted up on the grass at sufficient distances from each other to afford some sense of safety, comfort, and privacy, values which everyone’s body language and choice of grassy spot seemed to assert. However, the intention to perceive or even participate in an interaction was also an implication of our choice to visit a public park. Located inside a triangle created by two relatively busy streets and one somewhat busy one, there was plenty to hear. I went to the park feeling open to an encounter.

I am interested in the impulse to document a particular time and place, the special sausage casing that a recording creates around the events that fill it*, and the independence (but not complete separateness) of the recording from the intentions of any of the actors documented within it, including the recordist.

Field recordings are often situations in which multiple actors who don’t share the same goal co-create a work together. This encompasses a huge ethical range. Sometimes, these misalignments, conflicting goals, and power struggles are audible in the recording.

I am attracted to field recording because of its potential for openness, within very strict boundaries of time and space. Openness to coincidence; the result is not (cannot be?) predetermined. I want to treat turning on the wav recorder as a welcoming gesture.

There’s also a certain honesty that recording affords, which draws me to it. The recording is really what happened to the microphone. You’ll have to decide whether or not to trust me when I say I didn’t edit it at all. It feels vulnerable, and I’m honored to share that with you.

- SS

* Gabi Losoncy, Security Besides Love Part II (2017). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDDMqvGNN4A

These little piano pieces are a selection of 27 of a large catalog of similar fragments that I have been collecting over the past couple of years. In January of 2020, I started to go through hundreds of hours I had amassed of mostly useless recordings of myself playing piano since I was a teenager. I was looking for bits of interesting music in this mass of recordings, which mostly consisted of learning simple songs or some rudimentary and often pretty silly improvisations. I have never really considered myself a piano player and these recordings document the large part of my time spent at the keyboard. Around this time my computer also crashed, and when I recovered what I could, my pirated version of Ableton Live from 2008 no longer worked, so I begrudgingly started using Logic Pro (also pirated) to do music and audio stuff on my computer. I continued listening through these long recordings, cutting out little gestures that were mysterious or compelling for whatever reason. When the coronavirus lockdown began a couple months later, this became the only kind of musical attention I could sustain, and I spent a lot of long nights listening and collecting.

I guess in Ableton, when you drag the right side of a clipped segment of an audio file to the right, the segment extends with the original audio, so you’d hear what came after the clip in the original recording. But in Logic, or at least whatever setting I had it on, dragging the right side of a clip in the same way just loops the clip. This seems very unhelpful, except for that the first time I stumbled upon this, it so happened that the clip was one of these little 15-second piano segments, and the final chord or sonority transitioned to the first in a way that made me hear the entire passage as an interesting phrase or semi-full idea. The idea stayed interesting to listen to for about three or four repetitions, and then started to feel overly mechanical. For the first time in listening to these recordings, it felt like there was something with at least a vague sense of musicality. So this became my way of working through everything: over the past couple of years have listened back to (I think) all of the long recordings and have made a hundred or so of these little ideas that repeat a few times and usually last around one minute, identifying each of the fragments with the letter ‘e’ at the beginning of the file name, which doesn’t stand for anything.

But still, I don’t really know what these are or why I like them. One thing is that I like listening to these long recordings with an ear towards finding these repeatable semi-ideas from the sheer continuity of a mostly-unconscious improvisation. And then, having found something, figuring out how long the idea wants to be before it’s repeated, a natural cadence point, the relationship between that point and the “beginning” of the idea, and, secondarily, how many times it can be repeated before it starts to feel very loopy and mechanical. Some of the little fragments I am actually kind of impressed by, and it makes no sense that they actually came out of me, especially because I have no memory of playing any of these. Being much more “musical” than a lot of the “music” I’ve been interested in making over the past few years, this process has been a nice way to remember that I do really love “musical” music, making it and listening to it and thinking about it. This has also given me the chance to spend a bunch of time transcribing some of the fragments. Transcription was one of my earliest ways to love music, transcribing drum parts to Smashing Pumpkins songs when I was a kid or saxophone solos and choral music as I got older. It turns out that I still get a lot of joy out of listening to tiny slivers of music over and over and over again.

Through transcription, it’s also been interesting to notice what’s happening in these fragments musically that might have made them catch my ear. As you’ll see if you check out the transcriptions shared here, most of these are based in some kind of modal exploration of three scales that involve five black keys on the keyboard: Db major, B major, and F# major. This is pretty obvious, I guess, but because I’m not a pianist, playing around in these three modes allows me to think about the movement of voices, textures, and rhythmic interest between the hands while mostly constraining the modal possibilities because my hands sort of know where to be. So, because of the mostly frictionless feel of modal movement between, say a Gb Lydian space and a Db major space, the interest in a lot of these fragments might come from a single fortuitously placed chromatic tone. In a short idea where Db major is the center of gravity a single D-natural, maybe as part of a Bb major leading to an Eb minor, can provide what minimal harmonic density to make the idea feel like more than just twinkling, consonant gladness. Of course, all of these descriptions are coming much after the fact: none of these fragments appeared as themselves while I was playing through, and that hypothetical D-natural might as well have been a slip of the finger.

Listening to this stuff with a wide frame of hindsight also allows me to hear a kind of ghostly trace of all the piano music that I’ve been interested in learning to play over the past ten years. This is all quite amateurish hacking, but there are a few of these “e”s from I think around 2018, when I was plucking through some Bach two- and three-voice keyboard pieces. I can hear these somewhat baroque-sounding gestures (trills and certain kinds of arpeggios) in some of the fragments here, albeit filtered through hands that can only approximate them as gestures anyways. And there are a few from when I was checking out a bunch of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk transcriptions, although I don’t think that comes through in my playing. And there’s a bunch from a period of obsession with Brahms, which was sparked by reading something that described this one particular chord in a late piano intermezzo of his as some kind of “consolation” for having a basically unsatisfying life. After reading that, I spent a year or so learning that intermezzo, either because I thought that idea was bullshit or because I too wanted some consolation. Anyways, if that influence shows up at all, it’s in the more recent segments (not that they’re in order here) where the two hands are playing in a woozy 2:3 pattern and the right hand is doing these diatonic sixths in whatever key: for example, “ej 0621 10.” I guess the most obvious trace-influence is Satie, whose music was how I learned piano in the first place, starting at age seventeen. I’d want to say that the influence is from his later repetitive étude-like absurdist pieces rather than the saccharine earlier music that he’s more well-known for (maybe “e” stands for étude?). But then again I guess these “e”s are also a bit saccharine in their own way. That’s fine.

I’m happy to share these in this way, all laid out and kind of unmusically over-described, as is my preference. I still have vague ideas about ways for these specimens to come to life somehow: as a source for future collaborations, or arranged for some kind of brass and wind ensemble, or sampled, or used in some other way (feel free). For now though, just a long, neat row of these little shells of possible music in a display case.

- DB