Fractus IV is a quadraphonic, interactive composition for trombone and SuperCollider, commissioned by ASCAP/SEAMUS in early 2012.

Steve Parker, trombone

Fractus IV for Trombone and SuperCollider

For better listening experience, please use headphones

Double Bass: Dogukan Pahsa

Endspiel

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Performed by Science Ficta:

Sydney ZumMallen, bass viol
Loren Ludwig, bass viol
Caroline Nicolas, bass viol
Liam Byrne, bass viol 

Recorded by David Adamcyk
Scandinavia House, New York, March 2022

Program notes:

In Harmonie Universelle, Marin Mersenne writes the following about the viol:

"If one were to judge musical instruments according to their ability to imitate the human voice, and if one were to esteem naturalness as the highest accomplishment, so I believe that one cannot deny the viol the first prize, because it can imitate the human voice in all its modulations, even in its most intimate nuances..."

Indeed, there used to be a tradition of viol writing that particularly underlined the instrument’s perceived likeness to the human voice, among which a popular work being Marin Marais’s Les Voix Humaines. My piece Human Voices (2022), dedicated to the gamba quartet Science Ficta, is meant as a present-day response to this humanistic endeavor.

Acting as a 21st century counterpart to Marais’s Les Voix Humaines, Human Voices aims to question what “naturalness” might encompass in regard to the human voice. In order to liken the ensemble’s sound to the human voice, I 3D printed six human vocal tract models that are each tuned to a different vowel shape (/a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/, /ə/)[1], and amplified the gamba quartet through these tubes. Therefore, the quartet’s acoustic sound would be physically filtered through these models, imbuing the live performance with a vocal quality.

I did not conceive Human Voices as a singing machine; but rather as a musical experiment in which the listener is continuously invited to ask: “Did I just hear a voice in there?” The music is ultimately intended to function from within the realm of the uncanny, from a liminal zone that borders the human and non-human, or the so-called natural and unnatural. The sudden occurrences of the human sonic image therefore behave as brief transgressions that disturb this distinction. The human voice, a feature that is regarded to be unique to us, becomes reduced to a material construct, thus emphasizing our own material nature in return.

[1] I greatly benefited from Takayuki Arai’s acoustic research for this piece. The 3D models for the tubes /a/, /e/, /i/, and /o/ were downloaded from his website https://splab.net/apd/v100/. I modeled the tubes /u/ and /ə/ myself based on Arai’s work. Many thanks to Takayuki Arai for giving me permission to use his models in my piece.  

Art: Yugo Kohrogi

Human Voices (2022) for amplified viol quartet

This my 2nd produced track using Ableton Live.
In this track I tried to mix some of the oriental melodies with some punchy kick drums and bass.

BTW I'm not an Arab

This is a fixed media electronic piece for a quadrophonic speaker array.
The cover art for this track was created in TouchDesigner!

uieei nntrstng

Track from Geena Marie Hernandez's movie CHICKS

Finale from "CHICKS"

Jordan Strum, Sound Recording Engineer
Performance from 5.2.2014 in Pollack Hall, McGill University
video: https://vimeo.com/90421961
A prayer. Mani.Gonxha is an intensely intimate ritualistic experience for the performer that becomes naked and exposed when placed in front of an audience. It is as if one were to visit a church and find someone deep in personal prayer; this moment of great significance for the individual creates a somewhat unsettling but captivating situation for the observer.

Through the use of two Tibetan singing bowls – traditionally sacred instruments used as a signal to begin and end periods of silent meditation – Billone extracts a rich soundscape featuring a variety of impacts, timbres, resonances and harmonics one would not imagine could be produced by a single source. The bowls are an extension of the hands (Mani); they become part of the performer, just as the performer himself becomes part of the resonant body. The slightest contact between various materials – metal, skin, bones, torso, and voice – multiplies and propagates sound through the performing body and into the open.

Gonxha is a reference to Mother Teresa’s Albanian birth name, Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu. Furthermore, Gonxhe in Albanian translates to “bud”, or the “knoblike growth on a plant that develops into a flower,” much like the elaborate sonic universe that is developed from the simple source of two singing bowls.

- Noam Bierstone and Christian Smith (2014)



MANI.Gonxha Für Zwei Tibetanische Klangschalen (2012) by Pierluigi Billone (b.1960)

「Broke Up」

08 - Kristina Golubkova - Bitch, I Am Trying To Disappear

"Mad House" is a track from Siara-Lauren Brown's 2020 film Life in the Between.

Endspiel

Anna Kristina Golubkova

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