schemes that offer us a sense of futurity (2021) - for amplified soprano voice, flute, clarinet, violin, and electronics

TAK Ensemble: Charlotte Mundy, voice; Laura Cocks, flutes; Madison Greenstone, clarinets; Marina Kifferstein, violin
Recorded at Baryshnikov Arts Center, NYC, April 25, 2021
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more info + HQ audio here: juliozuniga.info/works/schemes_that_offer_us_a_sense_of_futurity.html

photo credit Emiliano Zúñiga

schemes that offer us a sense of futurity

composed and performed by Christopher Otto
engineered, edited, mixed and mastered by Christopher Botta

Violin Octet

For synthesizer and field recordings

Released by Party Perfect!!!, PP-06

https://alwayspartyperfect.bandcamp.com/album/pp-06

Mastered by Eli Crews

Nervous Systems (2023)

excerpt from Auguries I-IX, live set 2024

Auguries I-IX_Live Set 2024 (Excerpt 1)

fascia (2019) for clarinet and electronics

This work situates variable elements within a fixed environment: the clarinet assumes a shapeshifting form, breathing life into the monolithic rigidity of the electronics. 

Borrowing heavily from improvisations by clarinetist and improviser, Juliette Adam, the live-performed clarinet part permits an elasticity that welcomes risk, suspense, and uncertainty. The electronic counterpart recalls malfunction and inhabits a dark, science-fiction-inspired ambience invoked by sub-bass frequencies and heavily processed recordings of machines, mechanisms, and manufactured materials. 

Uncertainty proliferates with each musical unfolding, as the clarinet is subsumed under a chorus of insistent, subterranean rumblings and mechanical stridulations intoned by a network of non-musical objects, consumer electronics, and modified instruments.

Performed by Juliette Adam at Le Centquatre-Paris on 18 June 2019. 

Presented at Festival ManiFeste hosted by the Institute of Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM).

fascia | 18.06.2019 | Juliette Adam

"For George Lewis" is a pensive work that first drew inspiration primarily from a spontaneously composed, drone-based "Autoschediams" that I conducted in 2017 at the Banff Center, during which I employed only three gestures for the work's entirety. Additionally, this piece is heavily inspired by Lewis' work for large ensemble "The Will To Adorn" (2011). 

Adornment is a theme that runs central to all three aforementioned works, and yet adornment as a COMPOSITIONAL attitude is expressed in very different ways - in concept, sound, and scale. While Lewis' "Adorn" is an expression of adornment through unconventional use of instruments and an abundance of activity, the contrastingly static "For George Lewis" slowly unfolds and is expressed through layers, movement, and a very intense awareness and shifting/"decoration" of time. There is great attention to detail given to its temporal, formal, and harmonic construction, as well as precision, digression, layering, and expressive timing in groups situated within the ensemble. Both the Lewis piece and my composition are indeed very demanding for the performers and require a great degree of concentration on the part of everyone involved in these experiences.

This piece was commissioned and performed by Alarm Will Sound (16 players) on November 9, 2019 at Desmond Lee Concert Hall, St. Louis MO.

For George Lewis

Strategies for Managing Auto-Enactment Disorders, Volume 1 presents the fictitious, future facing healthcare company, Kirschner Computing, whose methods mobilize sound to make tangible one's most repressed mental activities. The cornerstone of their treatment program consists of analytic sessions with the PALS system (Psychoanalytic Listening Stations). Using advanced technological means, the PALS system represents and predicts one's psychic activity in sound so as to gain a more tangible grasp over it. Patients diagnosed with an Auto-Enactment Disorder will receive this audio-guide as a supplement to their clinical treatment.

Strategies For Managing Auto - Enactment Disorders, Volume 1

Chora(S)San Time-Court Mirage - Blues Dhikr Al-Salam (Blues Al Maqam)

plastic trombone with lots of plastic sounds, featuring a 1960s reed organ I found in a pawn shop back home... 

many thanks to Matt Teodori, Adam Bedell, Cullen Faulk for the inspiration and the samples.

two panels [for line upon line]

An improvisation made in my studio in April 2020 on the modular synth. It is largely based on ethnographic cylinder recordings from the Kodaly archive, made in April 1914. These small fragments are sampled with oscillators controlling the grain, loop size and time points of the samples. Pitch and envelope followers on the samples in turn control these oscillators and other physically modelled sounds. Yannis Kyriakides, Amsterdam, April 2020.

A Ghost Of Spring

TR088 - Nakul Krishnamurthy - 'Anudhatthamudhatthassvaritham'

Composer and artist from Vancouver, Canada

Nervous Systems (2023)

Stefan Maier