Name: Jet Stream & Arizona Sky by Joshua Brown
Duration: 7 min 32 s
Description: Jet Stream & Arizona Sky was commissioned by the São Paulo Contemporary Composers Festival and was premiered by the Unicamp Symphony Orhcestra, Cond. Maestro Christian Schultz in October 2019.

Performed by the Brompton Quartet:
violin I - Maja Horvat
violin II - Haim Choi
viola - Kinga Wojdalska
cello - Wallis Power

Wherever I have lived was written for ESCAPE, an interactive online event of new music, curated and produced by Will Davenport.

Recorded at Press Play Studio, London.
________

WHEREVER I HAVE LIVED is a gentle and airy piece, inspired by my home in rural Scotland and my train journeys between there and London.

It began as a response to Eve Beglarian’s composition, Landscaping for Privacy. She sets a poem by Linda Norton that describes a journey out of the city, leaving behind ‘the squalor, the mess.’ I was curious about the reverse: an escape from the countryside. This led me to stories about rural depopulation across Europe, and the rewilding that can result. I also thought of travelling from Scotland to London to start music school, which has been my first time living in a city.

The piece is in three sections. The first and third sections are based on shimmering arpeggios, alternating between simple major and minor triads. These chords were strongly influenced by Stuart MacRae’s Variation on Caprice 24. These sections are punctuated by fleeting bursts of electronically-distorted sound: a strange mix of trains, birds, city ambience, insects, wind, and machinery. 

The central section is slower, darker, and harmonically richer. It uses a short motif from Laurie Anderson’s The Nineteen Stars of Heaven, from her album Landfall. There’s a flowing viola solo, drifting high harmonics, and blurred rhythms.

The score uses a variety of unusual notation, including pizzicato notes scattered across bars with no rhythms given, and a semi-improvised passage where only the melody’s approximate shape is specified.

The title comes from the first line of Imtiaz Dharker’s poem, Front Door.

Wherever I have lived

Tone Stampede 4

Oil & Sugar

A quartet performed by Derek Hamersly (Piano), Yuna Hatano (Flute & Piccolo), Angela Rubin (Viola), and Hiroki Yuasa (Double Bass) at Carnegie Mellon University.

Cherry Bomb Suite

Recorded in a reading session by Pittsburgh-based new music ensemble, NAT28.

Bioluminescent Clusterfuck Of The Cherry - Bomb Fairy

Beejive

Jen Beattie, mezzo-soprano; Margaret Lancaster, flute; Adam Marks, piano

Hot Ass Poem

String quartet composed and premiered at the New Music for a New Year Festival (at Michigan Tech University — January 2019.)

Premiered by the Superior String Alliance Quartet (Lauren Pulcipher and Dani Simandl, violins — Ria Hodgson, viola — Kelly Quesada, cello.)

3. Revenge Body

Noisemachine is an audacious and bizarre mixed trio and fixed media by Boston-based composer and saxophonist Aidan Ramsay. Mixing influences from free jazz, black metal, noise music, industrial rock, and contemporary concert music, Noisemachine is a surreal and breathtaking trip through a world that is equal parts organic industrial, and electronic; a shifting mass of twisted metal and inconceivable shapes.

Personnel:
Aidan Ramsay - tenor saxophone
Synthesizer - Benjamin J. Penwell
Drum Set - Alex Dillon

Recorded in 2019 at Boston University by Georg Kári Hilmarsson and Joshua Fineberg.

Noisemachine

Images by Bozza

Written and performed by Emily Johnson-Erday.
Additional vocals by Julia Houghton.

He said it won’t be water
He said it won’t be rain
He said we wouldn’t have anybody 
But our own damn selves to blame

It won’t be the water
It won’t be the rain
It won’t be the water 
Oh Lord, it’ll be the flame

Did you ever hear the story
Of old Noah and the flood
How our Father broke the sky apart
And spared him from the mud?

When you heard about the rainbow
Did you ever wonder why
He would ever grant us a second chance
If we’re all born to die

It won’t be the water
It won’t be the rain
It won’t be the water 
Oh Lord it’ll be the flame

Now He looks on His creation
Grieving what He sees
As we kill His children in His name
And ignore the least of these

And the same poor sinners preaching 
The lessons of his son
Let a hundred holy houses burn
But only mourned for one

He’s begging us to listen
To the signs from up above
He knows that hate is easy
And, God knows, we need more love

It won’t be the water
It won’t be the rain
It won’t be the water 
Oh Lord, it’ll be the flame

Are we bound for peace and plenty
In the land of endless days?
Or did he say it would be the fire this time
Cause he knew we’d light the blaze?

Did he say it would be the fire this time
Cause he knew we’d light the blaze?

The Fire This Time

Jet Stream & Arizona Sky was commissioned by the São Paulo Contemporary Composers Festival and was premiered by the Unicamp Symphony Orhcestra, Cond. Maestro Christian Schultz in October 2019.

Jet Stream & Arizona Sky

Joshua Brown is an American sound artist and dramaturg split between Louisville, KY and Pittsburgh, PA. His work often explores the innate musics of everyday language and noise, existential dread, and intimacy in the new media age. His music and sound art have been presented at home and abroad at the São Paulo Contemporary Composers Festival, the Charlotte New Music Festival, the International Computer Music Conference, and at the Pittsburgh Opera. As a dramaturg, he has directed and produced contemporary opera festivals and new play workshop series. Joshua holds a BHA in Technical Writing & Music Technology and an AMS in Music Composition from Carnegie Mellon University. He is currently a Sound Apprentice at Actors Theatre of Louisville.

Jet Stream & Arizona Sky

Joshua Brown

Related tracks