Name: Ins Wasser eingeschrieben (2014) for two violas by Trevor Bača
Duration: 19 min 39 s
Description: This performance given by violists John Pickford Richards and Elizabeth Weisser on 7 February 2015 in Paine Hall on the campus of Harvard University.

This performance given by violists John Pickford Richards and Elizabeth Weisser on 7 February 2015 in Paine Hall on the campus of Harvard University.

Ins Wasser eingeschrieben (2014) for two violas

commissioned by Deutschlandradio Kultur and CTM Festival. Broadcasted on 2.09.2016: http://www.deutschlandradiokultur.de/ursendung-the-dia-grammatology-of-space.1022.de.html?dram%3Aarticle_id=364100

(dia)grammatology of space (full radio version)

Tokyo

Ecker & Meulyzer “Carbon” (SUB033)

Digital & CD: https://eckermeulyzer.bandcamp.com/album/carbon

Koenraad Ecker and Frederik Meulyzer make their Subtext debut with Carbon. 

Based on field recordings made at Norway’s Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a secure seed bank located on the island of Spitsbergen, Carbon grapples with the many contradictions that lie at the heart of our shift into the capitalocene. The project began in 2017, when Ecker and Meulyzer scored the performance “Frozen Songs,” a commission by Zero Visibility Dance Company led by Ina Christel Johannesen.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was conceived of as an effort to preserve copies of seeds from key crop varieties, ensuring their persistence in the event of large-scale crises. Yet the area is warming faster than anywhere else on earth, causing the permafrost to melt and putting the seed vault at risk. 

Across from the Seed Vault lie the decrepit remnants of Svalbard’s mining activities of the early 20th century; Carbon wrestles with the incongruities nestled in the town’s landscape. Reflecting on dissonances of stasis and change, closeness and distance, enclosure and expanse, as well as cynicism and hope, Ecker and Meulyzer consider the urgency of our situation while trying to sidestep all-too popular depictions of dystopia. In Ecker’s own words, “we don’t have the luxury to afford that kind of pessimism.” 

From close, supple sounds to cold, brutal sonics, Carbon meditates on the many challenging questions and contradictions raised by the Seed Vault and its surroundings—a landscape that embodies and makes visible the many intertwined phenomena that shape our current predicament.

Ecker and Meulyzer, formerly known as Stray Dogs, have released works such as Wasteland, recorded in deconsecrated church in Antwerp, and Kalkar, recorded in the cooling tower of a former power station in Germany. 

Koenraad Ecker works in the fields of electro-acoustic music, field recording, radio plays, stage performance and text. Together with Andrea Taeggi, he is part of the Opal Tapes-affiliated duo Lumisokea. His output encompasses studio albums, audiovisual installations, texts, performances, and sound design for film. 

Frederik Meulyzer is a percussionist active in projects including Belgian jazz band Hamster Axis of the One-Click Panther, contemporary music and theatre company Post uit Hessdalen, and experimental psych-krautrock band Slumberland.

The ecological impact of the production of this record will be compensated through a carbon offsetting program .

Bandcamp

Ecker & Meulyzer - Growth

I've Never Been Able To Wedge My Smiles And My Panic Attacks

French composer Melaine Dalibert has before quoted Deleuze, referring to his own compositional practice as working on (and with) the behaviour or "space-time blocks". Here his philosophy unravels specific to the covid-19 pandemic; a beautifully spare and minimalist solo piano work, taking the form of a 20-minute long rallentendo which reflects the drop in tension that we are experiencing.

---

Music written & performed by Melaine Dalibert. Recording and mastering by Hervé Jegaden & David Launay.

TR002 - Melaine Dalibert 'Un Long Ralentissement' [sample]

played & recorded @ library Schlachthaus Theater, Bern - CH
RBW Residenz Juni 2020

Schlachthaus Theater

Trillion's «modernes leben für das Volk» | Studio Mondial #47 - Radio Bollwerk - 27.06.2020

"out of the vast void,

immerging resonances

receding again"

- Johnny Chang


A new piece by the Viola Torros, the ongoing research project by composer-performers Catherine Lamb and Johnny Chang, which seeks to realise and arrange the compositions of a pre-medieval composer, Viola Torros. A real pleasure to release this work following their stunning double CD on Another Timbre in late 2018.

Viola T. was an anonymous composer who worked outside of the religious and academic establishments of her time. In her own practice, she documented her works in a minimally effective way, just enough to communicate with her fellow collaborators but barely enough to preserve a legacy for later generations of enthusiasts of her music.

The concept of ‘research’ referred to by the Viola Torros Project involves studies of various relevant musical styles of the pre-medieval period (arabic, byzantine and indian modes), and investigating possible evolution of melodic and harmonic developments as V. T. might have discovered. Choosing one aspect of such a musical style to focus upon, details are discovered and presented in an arrangement for two violas, often with additional augmentations.


--

Johnny Chang & Catherine Lamb - violas & arrangement

--
Originally recorded by Bryan Eubanks, Düsseldorf 2017

Edited in 2020 by Johnny Chang

Artwork design by Oliver Barrett

Viola Torros

TR036 - Viola Torros Project - Johnny Chang & Catherine Lamb - Prelimainary Study for V.T. [sample]

Piano practice session extract from "Viene la sera" of Puccini's Madame Butterfly. 

Johnny Chang -  Augmentation / expansion / compilation/ piano

Butterfly Voicing Study

Hollowing

Playlist and other information available at: https://www.freeformfreakout.com/fffoxy-podcast-178/

FFFoxy Podcast #178

I understand my music as an emotive encoding. I write because I feel an emotional compulsion to write — to give form to fantastic or impossible colors and shapes as sound and as pleasure — and, yet, when I write, I am intensely aware of the fact that I am setting up and taking apart a code. I write for different combinations of instruments in chamber and orchestral settings and the written score is an important part of how I work. The act of score preparation is, for me, an emotional effort deeply concerned with the weight and energy and physical charge of raw and vibrant sounds, and, in equal measure, a type of work that is surpassingly symbolic, intimately bound up with the networks of potential meaning set up by marks on the page. I reject any dichotomy that pits the analytic against the emotional. Symbols can, and do, cut like knives. And I work for a music that is everywhere an emotional play of symbols, complete with all the almost unworkable contradictions such a play of symbols carries.

I don't understand either the societal or psychological parts of the composer role. And I would just as soon replace it with some other type of work carrying some other type of baggage. Sorcery, perhaps. A special appeal to concentration, with concern for a secret language of symbols, a secret way of reading the events and details of the natural world. I want music to be an intensely shared and public experience. And I want the intensity of that experience to result, at least in part, from an effort of decipherment, and translation, on all our parts.

My music comes back again and again to a constellation of images, and desire. The beauty of reflected and refracted light. The relationships between code and power and time. The assertion of power and importance in an everyday type of living. The delicacy of flowers and their parts. And networks of people and our relationships. I believe that there is something utterly human in rendering flashes of these ideas as symbols on the page, designed specifically for experience in some other, potentially unknown, place.

[American composer Trevor Bača (*1975) grew up in Texas. His concerns as a composer include lost and secret texts; broken and dismembered systems; sorcery, divination and magic; and the effects, action and beauty of light. Bača's music has been played throughout the world with recent performances in Barcelona, Berlin, Boston, Cologne, Curitiba, Darmstadt, Helsinki, Huddersfield, Leuven, Ljubljana, Los Angeles, Lyon, Maastricht, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, Thessaloniki, Tokyo, Trieste, Würzburg and elsewhere. Bača holds a PhD in music composition from Harvard University.]

Ins Wasser eingeschrieben (2014) for two violas

Trevor Bača

Related tracks