it's a song that reflects my life with ADHD, the doom to fail any singular task, the chaotic mind of mine really lets me do stuff like this.

Neuron Dicer

This song cycle was written September 15th 2018 by Allison Simpkins for an SMU event called 24 Hour Concert. Using text by poet Hannah Teves, she wrote from 7:30pm the night before the concert to 7:30am the next morning.
Performers:
Mezzo-soprano - Lauren Davis
Cello - Caelan Sun
Jacob Hord - Percussion

Little Thoughts (Allison Simpkins)

Klangforum Wien
Pharos International Contemporary Music Festival
Nicosia, Cyprus, October 2018

Siray III - Concentric Squares

Artwork: Charles Demuth, "I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold" (1928)

1. JUST - !

Artwork: Odilon Redon, "Flower Clouds" (1903)

2. Wish?

Nathan Ben-Yehuda, piano

The Juilliard School
March 25, 2019

Artwork: Gustav Klimt, "Cottage Garden" (1905)

gehende.

https://sumatranblack.bandcamp.com/album/colorful-places-to-live-and-play

Taken from Ataşehir – “Colorful Places to Live and Play”

Ataşehir, is a huge residential development on the Asian side of Istanbul, Turkey. The titles are taken from aspirational advertising slogans of various residential developments from around the world.

Notes about the recording:

A long-term obsession with the Stars of The Lid album “And Their Refinement of the Decline” has meant that I’ve always dabbled in drone style compositions and so it was perhaps inevitable that a full drone release would happen sooner or later.

The residential development area of Ataşehir is an unusual choice as an inspirational jumping off point. For many its skyline dominating luxury apartment complexes and implausibly shiny shopping malls are representative of the worst sides of aspirational living. But for me there the area has always evoked some, albeit brief, deep tremendous feeling of awe and possibility.

Of course it passes and my mind wakes up to the cynically designed park areas, haunting lack of pedestrians and the designated entertainment complexes devised for “modern urban living”. You can imagine it all as a scale model on an architect’s boardroom table scrutinized by billionaire investors who would never dream of living in such a place.

And so it is my own internal tension between these two opposing feelings that I’ve attempted to express in this collection of compositions.

Ataşehir - Safe, Sound, Yours

Performed by Lindsey Eastham

Notes: 
“Tinctures” is a reference to term used by William Yeats an Irish poet. Yeats along with his wife’s help Georgiana Hyde-Lees created A Vision, this substantial volume of written texts was the result of his experimentation with ‘automatic writing’, where the and the pen were used as unconscious instruments that the realm of spirits would use to convey information. Through this exercise Yeats made an intricate symbolic system, which also had geometrical, astrological, psychological, metaphysical and historical components, which to him was a model of the entire universe. Yeats determined certain patterns, which he called, gyres, existed: covered cones that represent the combinations of opposites within a personal and historical nature. This allowed Yeats to craft his character’s humanity/ personality through this system. 

These cones are represented by Concordia, unity; the other by Discordia, desire. Within this symbolism, the cone of Discordia (which he also refers to as the ‘antithetical tincture’) is our imaginative side, which is incessant; it separates one individual from the next (which can also be understood on subjective terms, those of beauty). In turn, the cone of Concordia (also known as the ‘primal tincture’) is our detached, intellectual side, that which leads us where we belong or to what can be understood on terms of objectivity or truth to ourselves). Musically, I was at first inspired by spiral movement of the gyre. Yeats’ conceptual reduction of character traits as a tincture was a fascinating idea to use compositionally. Pairing this relationship of Concordia and Discordia with the image of two spinning gyres gave me the explosive foundation to embody what I feel is transformative.

Tinctures

for Hypercube
by arrangement of Charlotte New Music

Erin Rogers- tenor saxophone
Jay Sorce- electric guitar
Andrea Lodge- piano
Chris Graham- percussion

Change From Changing (2020)

Less music theory, more music conspiracy theory

Change From Changing (2020)

Nick Fagnilli

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