> mixed for high-volume headphone listening <

Performed by Charlotte Mundy and Marina Kifferstein

Max Murray | Szilárd Wept / for soprano, violin, and electronics

Bring It

Acidofile

2022
title: Sojourner Truth (cartes de visite after 1864)
2 instruments (variable), 2 recordings
7–10 mins. (variable) 
part of Songs (Book 1)
Ning Yu (piano and sine tones), Andrew Stock and Sivan Silver-Swartz (recordings), live performance Chicago 2.4.23
mixed by David Bird and Andrew Stock

Untitled ("I sell the shadow to support the substance")

Splittings, for just intonation vibraphone and electronics, was written for percussionist Daniel Lewis and premiered at Constellation on the 2023 Frequency Series. Juxtaposing equal tempered sine tones and just intonation vibes, this piece plays with the uncanny, fusing the two tunings and transporting the listener to a saturated harmonic universe. 

This piece was recorded and mixed by David Bird at the 2024 CHIMEfest at UChicago.

Splittings - for just intonation vibraphone and electronics

Apocrypha - for violin, viola, and electronic sounds, composed by David Bird, performed by andPlay (Hannah Levinson and Maya Bennardo), February 25, 2017, at the Dimenna Center for Classical Music, NY 

"Apocrypha" is written for violin, viola, and electronics, and is loosely inspired by Stanislaw Lem's 1961 novel "Solaris". Lem's work follows a team of scientists stationed on a distant planet covered by a vast and gelatinous ocean. In the novel, the ocean demonstrates a bizarre ability to manipulate the emotions and memories of the scientists. "Apocrypha", exploits a similar process, where the enveloping presence of the electronic sounds prompt turmoil and sensation within the duo's intimate performance. “Apocrypha" was written for andPlay (Hannah Levinson and Maya Bennardo), and was developed in the summer of 2016 at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute.

“In the budding, growth, and spread of this living formation, in each of its movements separately and in all taken together, there was something one was tempted to call a cautious yet not timid naivety, as it strove frantically and rapidly to know, to take in, an unexpectedly encountered new shape. Then, in mid-journey, it had to withdraw when it was in danger of transgressing certain boundaries established by a mysterious law. This agile inquisitiveness was so utterly at odds with the immensity that stretched to every bright horizon. I had never before been so aware of its vast presence, its powerful, inexorable silence breathing evenly through its waves. Staring in wonderment, I was descending to regions of inertia that might have seemed inaccessible, and in the gathering intensity of engrossment I was becoming one with this fluid unseeing colossus, as if—without the slightest effort, without words, without a single thought—I was forgiving it for everything.”

davidbird.tv

Apocrypha - for Violin, Viola, and Electronic Sounds

mirror (prod. braydo)

Bethany Younge’s acoustic and electronic music explores the manifold kinesthetic properties of musical performance. For her, the act of music-making cannot be divorced from the physical presence of the human instigator. Her works often incorporate instrumental deconstruction, exaggerated movement, motion tracking, sounding costumes, and/or other aesthetic devices to sonically heighten corporeal expressivity. Younge is currently pursuing her DMA in Music Composition at Columbia University in New York. Her works have been featured in the 2016 and 2018 International Summer Course for New Music Darmstadt, Resonant Bodies Festival, Gaudeamus Muziekweek, The 16th International Young Composers Meeting, and many other festivals. She has worked with many ensembles including JACK Quartet, Distractfold, ASKO|Schönberg Ensemble, TAK Ensemble, TILT Brass, Sputter Box, KLANG, Ereprijs Orkestra, Fonema Consort, AndPlay, Chartreuse, Gyre Ensemble, Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble, Inversion Ensemble, Mocrep, and others throughout Europe and the USA. In 2016, she was awarded the Stipend Prize at the International Summer Course for New Music Darmstadt. She was also awarded a commission prize by National Sawdust, in New York City and the 10th Mivos/Kanter prize.

Bethany was one of TAK's commissioned composers of the 2019-2020 season, and we premiered her work "at midnight I walked into the middle of the desert" at Saint Mary's Church in Harlem last fall.

On today's episode, Bethany speaks with Merche Blasco, a multimedia artist and composer based in New York.
Blasco designs and builds imprecise technological assemblages that catalyze embodied forms of live electroacoustic composition and new modes of listening. Through her constructed devices, she attempts to establish a more horizontal relationship with other entities, distancing herself from parameters of precision, power, and control. As an alternative form of performance, she engineers collaborative spaces with instruments that are given their own agency, in compositions where her body and the live exploration of organic materials are central elements.
She has presented her performances and installations at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Sonar Festival in Barcelona, La Biennale di Venezia, NIME conferences, Tsonami International Sound Art Festival in Chile, The High Line in New York, SONIC Festival, Mapping Festival (Geneva), Queens Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago de Chile, among others. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Wire magazine.

You can find Bethany online at: 
www.bethanyyounge.com  

You can find Merche online at:
http://half-half.es/
https://soundcloud.com/mercheblasco
@blasco.merche

The music in this episode is all by Merche Blasco:

RECONFIGURATIONS I: Conversations with Anette
Shelley Hirsch – Voice
Dafna Naphtali – Voice, electronics
Levy Lorenzo – Percussion
Dennis Sullivan – Percussion
Merche Blasco – Anette
Audio recording and mix: Yi-Wen Lai-Tremewan

Bardenas, live performance by The Rhythm Method
Leah Asher, violin
Marina Kifferstein, violin
Carrie Frey, viola
Meaghan Burke, cello

EEMF03: Rinoceronte azul
Christa Robinson … Electric guitar + electric toothbrushes
Alice Teyssier … Antenna and piezoelectric collar
Mosa Tsay … Electric guitar + electric toothbrushes
Viola Yip … Antenna and piezoelectric collar

Viento y Sierra
Merche Blasco - Electronics and musical saw

Rehearsal saws - recorded in Cleft Ridge Span in Prospect Park
Gryphon Rue - Musical saw
Merche Blasco - Musical saw

This week's episode was produced by Bethany Younge in collaboration with TAK Ensemble, and edited by Marina Kifferstein.

014. Bethany Younge and Merche Blasco

Brandon Lopez is a bassist/improviser/composer who works at the intersection of jazz, free improvisation, noise and new music. He has been an artist-in-residence at Roulette and Issue Project Room, performed as a soloist with the NYPhilharmonic and in ensembles with Fred Moten, Okkyung Lee, Ingrid Laubrock, Tyshawn Sorey and Gerald Cleaver, who is his guest for this episode. 

TAK commissioned and performed Empty Church of Plenty with Brandon in the fall of 2019 at St. Mary’s Church in Harlem and on the 2020 New Ear Festival. 

Gerald Cleaver, a drummer/improviser/composer who’s worked with Henry Threadgill, Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richard Abrams, and William Parker. He’s the bandleader of Violet Hour, Black Host and he recently released an album of electronic music titled Signs.

Gerald Cleaver's 
Signs: https://577records.bandcamp.com/album/signs
Black Host: https://geraldcleaversblackhost.bandcamp.com/releases

Brandon Lopez's
bandcamp: https://nevernotagravedigger.bandcamp.com/
website: https://www.brandonlopez.nyc/
 
to learn more about TAK, go to http://takensemble.com

015. Brandon Lopez and Gerald Cleaver

In this week's episode, Brad Garton interviews composer Taylor Brook and multi-media artist Lara Lewison about Star Maker Fragments, the new album from TAK Ensemble, out 3/3/2021.

Lara Lewison creates audiovisual art for the web and for live performance, with a focus in networking, language, and creating live works that are dependent on exchanges between “performer" and “audience." She works with combinations of software and programming languages and has given unity workshops and lessons at Harvestworks, CUNY Tech, and Columbia. She holds a bachelors of arts in music from Columbia University and was the 2020 recipient of the Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts.

Taylor Brook writes music for the concert stage, electronic music, music for robotic instruments, as well as music for video, theatre, and dance. He has worked with Ensemble Ascolta, JACK Quartet, Mivos Quartet, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Quatuor Bozzini, Talea Ensemble, and others. He has won numerous SOCAN Young Composers awards, including two first-place prizes and the grand prize in 2016 for Song, for solo cello.

Brad Garton is an American composer and computer musician who is professor of music at Columbia University. He has written, or helped to write, a number of computer music applications, including Real-Time Cmix, music synthesis and signal processing language for real time composition.

Star Maker Fragments: takensemble.bandcamp.com/album/star-m…er-fragments

Star Maker World: laar.world/starmaker/

Lara Lewison: laar.world

Taylor Brook: Taylorbrook.info

Brad Garton: sites.music.columbia.edu/brad

Apocrypha - for Violin, Viola, and Electronic Sounds

david_bird