2023 January Catskill Listening Club Offerings
Rodney Greenblat. Rodney made a sculpture - Box With Tubes - that works in tandem with a small cassette player boombox. His experiment unleashed a very rich discussion spanning artifacts, cultural memory, cassette labels, time, distance; all the things that music can do to a person. He's exploring tape noise and "tape noise". He made a series of 4 recordings, all of the same 2-minute composition. Each recording introduced a different type of "tape" noise: a real cassette, an analog recording of the cassette playback transferred to a digital file, a digital transfer of the cassette recording, the original digital composition mixed with "tape" noise plugins. He played all of these for us thru the same boombox.
Garlands. David shared a brand new piece of music that he and Kenji made as the musical duo Garlands. These are always such a rareified feast for the club! This January offering featureed bass clarinet and modular synth, in addition to their signature droning guitar-thing. > AUDIO FILE TO COME <
Jimmy Garver. Jimmy recently completed a big composition, commissioned for a world premiere dance performance, choreographed by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa. He shared a 10-minute version. People remarked on the expressiveness of the low end. We also talked about how the story of the music greatly enhanced the story of the narration - both the music and the narration were made larger than either could be alone.
NOTE: the graceful, charming Tyler Wood plays piano and Andres Munar voices the narration.
Stephen Spera. Steph shared a new piece of his music from a forthcoming album. This is a first, very imperfect mix - still in process, compositionally as well as technically. He's exploring ASMR, using the quiet yet sharp fricatives and plosives of that speech style as a jumping-off place in this piece. We talked about how his music is often revealing and uncovering layers of sound that are not obvious until space is given to them.
Winslow. This is a composition that Winslow made with a piezo + transducer device. (a piezo is a contact microphone; it captures vibrations thru solid objects, not thru the air like other microphones). His process was to place the device on a piano's plate (or harp), strike or stroke the harp, make that recording, and then edit and filter out the sections of extreme feedback. Super interesting results!
Nancy Dalnim. "Howls of Ancestors Past" a recording made during a session where Nancy practiced more restraint than usual to allow tension to build. Feedback, drone, and found sounds were used.