Paul McGuire

For Electric Guitar, Piano and String Quartet

paulmcguirecomposer.com
paulmcguirecomposer@gmail.com

Badlands

'Storage' [SLP018], the ravishing debut release from British composer Aaron Parker, collects five works attentively compiled over a period of almost three years. Parker’s pieces are as much ‘environments’ as ‘compositions’: rich ecosystems where strata of fibrous acoustic and electronic sound are overlaid in undulating cycles at once mechanical and utterly natural.

Lead cut ‘Warehouse’ is a substantial ensemble piece dating from 2012, where lurching winds, balletic metal percussion, and chiming harps curiously assemble around a supple violin line and a dripping metronomic glitch. Though it owes a debt to the mammoth, chugging minimalism of ‘70s Glass and Reich, ‘Warehouse’ is far from brutal, and exudes a lushness more akin to the environmental works of Zimoun and Chris Watson.

'Storage''s accompanying works - which take their titles simply from the GPS location and date on which they were completed - foreground electronic over acoustic processes. Parker’s looped scrapes, sighing machines, and snatches of field recording reverberate in strange, artificial acoustics. These uncannily melodic pieces distort both temporal and spatial perception, and the influence of Cage, Eno, and Giuseppe Ielasi loom large.

Parker is as indebted to visual ruminations upon landscape - Larry Gottheim, Norman Ackroyd, Gerhard Richter, Julian Opie - as sonic ones. Fittingly, 'Storage'’s completion owes much to an intense period of collaboration with visual artist Susie Whaites. One of a limited series of 60 photographs by Whaites is contained within each copy of this limited release, which comes paired with a cassette, the full digital audio files, and a bonus talk tape with early pressings. Mastered by Rupert Clervaux.

@aaron-parker-2
www.aaron-parker.com
www.slipimprint.co.uk

Storage [SLP018] - Aaron Parker
Released: January 2016

Warehouse - Aaron Parker

Clint McCallum's Bowel Resection.  Recording for Populist Records. 



Clint McCallum- Bowel Resection

matt barbier & weston olencki
RAGE THORMBONES

01.12.2016
betalevel
los angeles, ca

m.b. (mix-master)

m. barbier gravlax [b]

Three pieces for string quartet performed by the Quatuor Bozzini on the 5th Feb 2016 at the Woodend Barn, Banchory Scotland. Recording engineer Nicolas Godmaire.

The concert concluded the second week of work in the Composer's Kitchen, following part one in Montreal in June 2016. The project has been fantastic and I'm very grateful to the Quatuor Bozzini, Sound and Music, Sound Scotland, Christopher Butterfield, Christopher Fox, Egidija Medeksaite, Kyle Brenders, James O'Callaghan, Nicole Rochman, Nicolas Godmaire and everyone else who contributed to making it happen.

Three pieces for string quartet 2016

Caput in Rves

IMPORTANT: Please listen at a LOUD comfortable volume that makes your ear parts move a little. You should hear a lot of air shifting. (Ideally headphones or biggish bass-friendly speakers.) 


Written in close collaboration with Distractfold Ensemble, featuring: 


Rocío Bolaños - bass clarinet (w transposition pedals)
Daniel Brew - electric guitar
Linda Jankowska -  bowed kick + snare drums (drums outfitted with bridges + strings)
Christian Smith - bowed kick drum (as above)+ other percussion
Alice Purton - cello (w transposition pedals)
Sabrina Schroeder - transducers (playing bass drum, floor tom, and plywood cubes via live-manipulated sound waves through transducers).

Transducer performance interface developed with programming and design support from Josiah Oberholtzer, and from Michael Acker of the Experimentalstudio de SWR Freiburg. 

This live-performance recording was made at the 48th Internationale Ferienkurse in Darmstadt (Aug. 7th, 2016)

BONE GAMES (2016) for amplified ensemble

Score: http://files.cargocollective.com/374343/Lung--total-score-.pdf

London Symphony Orchestra & Daniel Harding
Barbican, 25th September 2016

'Almost everything that happens in Jack Sheen’s piece is there in its first few bars. Rather like an Alexander Calder mobile, in which there is no foreground or background, and in which every element is equal to every other, Lung has been written without narrative or dramatic incident, in the usual sense of the terms, but as an object to be slowly considered from every angle.
 
But this is not to say that everything that happens can be heard in those first few bars. Sheen’s piece may be flat in one sense, but – again like Calder’s mobiles – it also has great depth of field, with layers of music rolling over each other to bring different elements in and out of view. Sheen divides his orchestra into independent groups that cross the traditional family barriers. So harp and alto flute pair up to play imaginary folktunes; piano, flute, clarinet and trumpets sound slowly changing arpeggios; and horns, violas and double basses sustain a harmonic bed. Most distinctive of all is a heavily muted trio made up of the leaders of the 1st violins, violas, and cellos. Apart from four cues from the conductor, indicating points where they should start and stop, they act entirely independently of the rest of the orchestra, cycling through their own collection of melodic loops.
 
The title refers first of all to the slow expansion and contraction of breath, but it might also suggest the self-similar division of the airways into smaller and smaller paths, each division reflecting the structure of the whole. Or, again, a labyrinthine organism, alive through constant motion.

- Tim Rutherford Johnson'

Lung

"In the end, the sea always wins."

From the upcoming album, “Costero”, out November 17 on Hammock Music. Stream on Spotify or Pre Order album via bandcamp / itunes and get immediate download of this track:

https://slowmeadow.bandcamp.com/
https://open.spotify.com/album/4U5yx0...
https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/cos...

A film by Gabriela Hansen on you tube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ics7ZfPL2fs&t=165s
http://www.gabrielahansen.com/

Costero

Lamellophone and the Gulf of Mexico

Purchase

Lamellophone And The Gulf Of Mexico

"McGuire's vision is convincing and his craft accomplished" 
– Liam Cagney, TEMPO: A Quarterly Review of New Music

"... rather marvellous... Clearly a composer to keep an eye on for the future" 
– Simon Cummings, 5against4.com

Paul McGuire (b. 1988) is a Dublin-born composer, sound designer and producer based in London. He is principally interested in noise and the timbral exploration of sound rather than in melodic, harmonic or rhythmic expression, and the musical material in his work is created through the complete re-imagining of instrumental performance practice.

Paul earned a B.A. (Hons.) in Music from Trinity College Dublin, where he specialised in composition under Donnacha Dennehy and Sean Reed. He recently completed a PhD in "Composing with an Expanded Instrumental Palette" with Jennifer Walshe and Christopher Fox at Brunel University London, funded by the 2012 Elizabeth Maconchy Composition Fellowship Award.

Paul has received international recognition for his music. In 2015, he was awarded the George Butterworth Prize for his chamber work Panels, and in 2013 he won the Pablo Wendel – Performance Electrics International Composition Competition for his piece Marshes, written for mass guitar ensemble. His music has been performed at international festivals including Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (UK), SPOR (Denmark), Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival (USA) and II Bienal Música Hoje (Brazil). He has collaborated with a number of established ensembles including London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Cross.Art, Open Source Guitars, and leading soloists Céline Papion, Sarah Nicolls and Loré Lixenberg.

In 2015, Paul released his debut album SLEEP SPINDLES on the London/Berlin-based Slip imprint. His piece Panels also features on NMC/Sound and Music's NEXT WAVE album, released in 2014.

Badlands

Paul McGuire | Composer