Equal parts composer, vocalist, and storyteller Shelley Hirsch is universally admired for an astounding gift firing off free association between words and sounds, which is our focus in this edition. Here with collaborators keyboardist/arranger Simon Ho, turntablist Christian Marclay, guitarist Kazuhisa Uchihashi, pipa master Min Xiao Fen, electronic percussionists Ikue Mori & Samm Bennett, cellist Okkyung Lee, keyboardist David Weinstein, and Horst Rickels’ Mercurius Wagen.

roulette.org

Shelley Hirsch: Primal Impulses

30 harmonic chords set up as areas in PolyHarp, run through AltiSpace2 with the TeufelBerg impulse response.

Grid Drops In The Berg

NOSTALGIA FOR THE HERE AND NOW by VIV CORRINGHAM
A 3D sound environment in binaural format: 
please use headphones/earbuds!

at Harvestworks Fluid art and tech exhibition, 10a Nolan Park, Governors Island, NY. August 27 - October 30 2022.
Installation combines field recordings, objects found in the streets, my own singing and people's responses to the questions "What sound would you most miss if it disappeared tomorrow?" and "What object do you most value?" As if someone from the future gathered together memories of our soundscape, along with our quotidian objects as a record of how we lived and what we cared about here and now. 3D sound environment created by Paul Geluso.

Nostalgia for the Here and Now (binaural version)

Bass tones, human interjections, and the perfect three minutes of unassailable pond. The beat of the plants and some few animals, just at the right points. Above I see harmony, perfection, proof of concept again and my idea.

It’s the rightness of pond music, most likely never to be so rightly heard again. The birth of collaboration, the sequester of love.

The last note is lower than the low.

Featuring Ilgin Deniz Akseloglu on words and voice.

When, the Sound

In a recent interview Brian Eno says lyrics have always troubled him. He just does not want to pay attention to the words, so rarely do they matter as much as the melody, rhythm, and sound.

I wonder if he would enjoy Ilgin Deniz’s half-made up, half-sensible sounds sung upon this resonated Cape Cod pond? Some are words in Turkish, some English, mostly they are the searching sounds of a singer just finding her voice, a poet-philosopher let loose in a more-than-human world of vegetable and animal sounds. Who is the mineral here? Maybe it is the sliding bass, so low that you won’t even hear it unless you have big headphones or a killer sound system.

We are here exploring the acoustic niche hypothesis, where every sound has its proper frequency and space. The aliens are here among us, right beneath in the pond.

Nerindi

The word is the surface of the land
Words give no hint for the tone 
The melody is only an approach, a diplomacy
To give the land voice, for it can evade 

Fish, birds, a river in the throes of death 
By the shores of unrest
Undaunted

The colic of the bass bends the nerves
And the strange chuckles behind  
Bells of a lost herd

Undaunted New Lands

This recording has really made Ilgin go mad. Mad with sound, with experiment, a philosopher and master of words moving away from words into sound. I am so happy listening to this happen. She is singing above the thrum, or is it a hum? Or is it a ring, something metallic, like a digital bell. I know it’s not quite a real bell because it is a digitized calculation of rings, too meticulous to be a figment of the actual world. Though it’s easy enough to simulate the actual world. The computer contains reams of actual sampled resonance curves, maps of overtones that explain what happens when you really strike a piece of resonating metal. The uneven evenness makes it all musical.

Those versions, though, just don’t sound as good. It’s as if it is better to know the resonance is artificial than to fake it into a real-sounding thing. I don’t know why that is so. I keep tweaking and re-tweaking because I feel the ringing pond beat is too obvious, too clearly a voice from a machine. But maybe that’s the most honest way to resonate something.

State Forest Pond Ring

RAUTAMUURAHAINEN

Konsertti taltioitu 23.8.2009 Koko-teatterissa, Helsingissä. 

This live improvised runosong and kantele concert took place 23.3.2009 in Koko Theatre, Helsinki.

Pauliina Syrjälä, kantele
Ilona Korhonen, runosong

Korhonen & Syrjälä: Sulhon tehtävät, katkelma (live)

Even though it's a song with a lot of lyrics and ideas, I was so pleased with the instrumental arrangement and recording that I wanted to share it without the vocals.

percussion: Emedin Rivera
bass, piano, sampled vibes, sampled accordion, sampled bassoon: Brian Woodbury
oboe, English horn: Soli Jones
violins: Sara Parkins

Grid Drops In The Berg

jhhl