Microgroove 1: Ultra-Laid-Back

Microgroove 3: Stretched 7

Microgroove 4: Slow 6/4

Microgroove 5: Drunk Hip-Hop?

Eric Puente, Synthesizers, Vocals, and Field Recordings
Jason Treuting, Drums, Vocals, and Field Recordings
Karl Ronneburg, Vibraphone, Vocals, and Field Recordings

Arrhythmia is a heart condition I have personal experience with in which the heart beats with an irregular or abnormal rhythm. Arrhythmias come in many forms and can be benign or dangerous. My musical explorations recently have focused on microrhythms, which are kind of like musical arrhythmias, and how they can be intentionally shaped(read more at https://www.karl-allmusic.com/microrhythms). The goal of this music is to use sound recordings gathered by the musicians to generate arrhythmic patterns in which the tempo and rhythm fluctuate in ways difficult to notate using traditional Western notation--but possible to understand through technology and emulate with practice! Objects and sound recordings have been chosen based on their inherent arrhythmic qualities as well as their sentimental value.

ARRHYTHMIA

Cut-up audio piece made using public domain samples from Archive.org's NASA Audio Collection

The Incident

Live excerpts from "SHAPES and the thought that made them", an 8-movement work featuring strings, saxophones, percussion, text, and electronics, the titles all reinterpreting (and in some cases, refuting) words from Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead".

the work takes place in a setting both urban and otherworldly, where monolithic forms dominate a landscape in which human nature grows green between the cracks like moss on a sidewalk

vii. the exception-making

Live excerpts from "SHAPES and the thought that made them", an 8-movement work featuring strings, saxophones, percussion, text, and electronics, the titles all reinterpreting (and in some cases, refuting) words from Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead".

the work takes place in a setting both urban and otherworldly, where monolithic forms dominate a landscape in which human nature grows green between the cracks like moss on a sidewalk

Performers: 
Andrea Voulgaris, Soprano Sax
Jonathan Hostottle, Alto Sax
David Foley, Tenor Sax
Jeffrey Leung, Bari Sax
Karl Ronneburg, Percussion

Ann Arbor, May 2016

III. spit on his stairways

There's a wildness at the core of my Pacific Northwest home—
a darkness too, and a melancholy—a gray-blue-dark-green,
the overwhelming aloneness the rain makes one feel,
but there's also a glory to it, a singing out, the open varied spaces:
it's riding a ferry past mountains in the morning, or driving through the woods at night,
it's a tiny beach town called Copalis,
which inspired a band and an album by the same name, which in turn inspired this music, 
it's hurricane cliffs and never feeling abandoned by the wind,
but instead wanting to abandon yourself within it, dreams 
from a bus on a bridge in the fog—I close my eyes
and see trees and the dark spaces between them, I see fog sighing off the mountain—
"the Log Lady", a character in David Lynch and Mark Frost's Twin Peaks (a tv show set about 20 minutes from my house), said it well: 
"I grew up in the woods. I understand many things because of the woods. Trees standing together, growing alongside one another, providing so much. I chew pitch gum. On the outside, let's say of the ponderosa pine, sometimes pitch oozes out. Runny pitch is no good to chew. Hard, brittle pitch is no good. But in between there exists a firm, slightly crusted pitch with such a flavor. This is the pitch I chew."

World Premiere Performance by the University of Michigan Symphony Band
"blue-green", by Karl Ronneburg
(Winner of the 2017 Brehm Prize for
Instrumental Composition)

Michael Haithcock, conductor
September 28, 2017
Hill Auditorium
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI

recorded and filmed by 
Dave Schall and Cory Robinson
www.daveschallacoustic.com

blue-green

Collaboration between Karl (rhythms) and Elliot Cole (pitches)

Karl

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