Performance: Oleg Tantsov (bass clarinet) and the author (electronics).
“Smena” (Kazan City, Russia). Apr. 8, 2021

An abbreviation “ISM” is an ironic allusion to IDM genre (“Intelligent Dance
Music”), so “ISM” means “Intelligent Sitting Music”. In the piece there are bass clarinet with two long delays and a click which sounds through the speakers, not through the headphones. An artistic idea is to avoid headphones, cables and devices which inhabit a performer. At the same time the click becomes an extra part of the piece. It starts with regular beat marking and then changes to flexible rhythm and finally imitate the clarinet part (and this is a real hint to IDM compositions where long continuous pitches often oppose to sophisticated percussion rhythm).

The clarinet part is ‘reflected’ by two delays and thus represents a 3-voice canon. But it is written in such manner that the polyphony and starting a new ‘voice’ is not marked but hidden: all episodes of the work smoothly change one another and every episode is gradually ‘filling’ by the sound.

An impression from my trip to the Young Composers Academy in Tchaikovsky-city (2018) in Moscow — Izhevsk train became an additional musical material for the work. Rails were producing sustained pitches building a chord reminding resonating minor triad on long turnings.

MCME in Smena Kazan

ISM for Reflected Bass Clarinet and Click

Master class in Tchaikovsky city, Russia (Perm Krai) with three students and participants of 'Dedication to Tchaikovsky' composers competition.
The participants played various instruments with extended techniques and me processed their sound electronically.

Чайковский. Мастер - Класс Н. Хруста 21.8.29

Performed by Nikolay Alifanov, Studio for New Music, cond. Igor Dronov, 2007

This piece is written specially for Young Composers Meeting 2006 in Apeldoorn, where a theme ʻWaiting for a bus stopʼ was supposed. So, the authorʼs task was to find a connections between constructive principle of the work being written and the theme given by organizers. The text appeard is as follows.
 
A passenger waiting for his bus is observing as a car is passing down the road; dusts are raising from under its wheels and settled onto something else after chaotic movement in the air. Than due to that (or, vice versa, because of quite different reason) something else is happening etc. Many processes — depending to each other in different degrees — are taking place around the observer. Every process, being generated by another one, ʻlivesʼ each own live, develops its own way.

Short phrases from some music are wafting from passing car stereos, sometimes being distorted by something like Doppler effect, but at once ʻsubmergeʼ among other sound and no-sound  ʻeventsʼ. All this stuff is filling all receptors and ʻscintillatingʼ so, that even time starts shrinking and stretching in sensations of the waiting person.

Sprawling street for barytone and large ensemble

Helen Bledsoe / Marina Rubinstein (flute)
Studio for New Music Moscow
Igor Dronov (conductor)

Nikolay Khrust. Quivering

5-minute piece, a study in my new GranShaper synth (see GranShaper presentation)

Sirenes. A study on GranShaper

This track is just a test improvisation of my GranShaper synth, combining principles of granular synthesis and waveshaping allowing discover some synergetic effects like ‘granular vocoder’ or ‘granshapemorphing’.

See my IRCAM article about that: https://forum.ircam.fr/article/detail/granshaper-synth-new-strategies-of-granular-synthesis-and-derivative-types-of-sound-synthesis-granular-vocoder-granular-waveshaping-and-granular-shape-morphing/ .

See video presentation of GranShaper:  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXoE6M7mD3Y .

nikolaykhrust

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