SEA FORMS (2020) is an ensemble work for 9 musicians: flute, oboe, clarinet, harp, piano, percussion, violin, viola, cello. It was performed at Radio France by L'instant donné.

Sea Forms (2020)

for recordings of satellites, string quartet and electronics

Paris, Centre Pompidou April 18th 2021
Quatuor Diotima

**********************

Achille Judica-Cordiglia and his brother Giovanni Battista are well-known amateur radio operators who claimed in the late fifties and early sixties to have heard radio communications taken from secret Soviet Union space missions, including SOS signals, telemetry, and the dying sounds (heartbeats and breathing) of a suffocating "lost cosmonaut.” Even though their claims have been thoroughly debunked, the stories of these sensational intercepts are part of the mythology of the Space Age and stand at the origin of a durable conspiracy theory.
In the 1960s, the idea of a “lost cosmonaut” spoke to acute fears. Despite the optimism of space exploration tales, the reality of space travel—from sending a dog into orbit to putting a man on the moon—had a striking effect on the public and raised more life-altering questions than it provided answers. A cosmonaut lost in space served as a poignant metaphor for individuals’ anxieties about the future in an era of nuclear tension and uncertainty. This helps to explain the diffusion and the longevity of a hoax that identified the stain of some kind of original sin on the shiny surface of the triumphs of the early space age. Now that the cosmos has switched in our imaginations from being the route toward a radiant future for humanity to a place of accumulation for space capitalism or a post-doomsday shelter for the extremely rich, these stories of dead astronauts are more sinister and haunting than ever.

The title "Memories of the Space Age" is borrowed from the collection of stories of the same name by J.G. Ballard (1988), a set of writings thematically linked around rotting launch gantries at Cape Canaveral, the failure of the US space program, dead astronauts eternally orbiting in space, deserted hotels lining the Florida coast, and the lonely, disturbed individuals who linger at the fringes of this lost dream of the Space Age.

The piece uses more than 100 historical radio recordings of human-made objects gravitating in Low Earth Orbit, for example, the beacon beeps of satellites, telemetries, and the voices of cosmonauts, along with the ill-famed Judica-Cordiglia tapes. This material—shifted and transposed to match the harmonic structure of the piece—is the starting point for an imitation game that involves the string quartet and that grows into a complex three-layered polyphony.

In addition to these archival materials, the electronic material features digital processing of the string instruments with the modulation techniques that were, and still are, commonly used for radio and television transmission. The fragile, inharmonic sonorities of the prepared strings are mirrored by electronic phenomena like feedbacks or physically-modeled chaotic circuits that behave in similarly erratic ways, in a laborious attempt to tame the untamable while at the same time pursuing serendipitous glitches.

"Memories of the Space Age" deals with the aesthetics of ground noise, white noise, and lost radio waves, with the misuse and malfunctions of technology, and with the misinterpretation of a chaotic signal as pareidolia. It is also, somehow, a nostalgic homage to obsolete or soon-to-be-obsolete technologies and to the visions of the future these technologies carried. That future now seems irretrievably lost, but its ghost, like Ballard’s dead astronauts, still haunts us.

Mauro Lanza - "Memories of the Space Age" (2020)

FULL :
https://www.francemusique.fr/emissions/creation-mondiale-l-integrale/signal-pour-orgue-de-florent-caron-darras-diffusion-integrale-et-portrait-du-compositeur-90881

Signal - 3rd Movement
© Florent Caron Darras, 2020
Recorded at Radio France, Paris, November 2020

Thomas Lacôte, Organ
Pierre Monteil & Antoine Hespel, Sound
Vincent Villetard : Artistic direction (Musicien metteur en ondes)


You are pleased to follow this link to listen to the whole piece (13mn) :

https://www.francemusique.fr/emissions/creation-mondiale-l-integrale/signal-pour-orgue-de-florent-caron-darras-diffusion-integrale-et-portrait-du-compositeur-90881

Signal ◆ for organ ◆ Mvt 3 - Thomas Lacôte / France Musique (2020)

Schallfeld Ensemble

Elisa Azzarà flute
Maria Flavia Cerrato piano
Manuel Alcaraz Clemente percussion
Myriam García Fidalgo cello


Recorded on 26.08.2021 at KUG, Theater im Palais, Graz, as part of impuls Festival (www.impuls.cc) - Schallfeld Ensemble as Ulysses Network Young Ensemble in Residence, supported by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union

Reuben Jelleyman - Klein Fountain (2020)

Trumpet concerto performed by Philippe Brunet and the Henry Mancini Institute Orchestra

During the summer of 2013, I met Philippe Brunet at the Atlantic Music Festival, where I was composition faculty and he was an instrumental fellow. He led a remarkable group of brass players in a performance of my brass quintet, which greatly impressed me. I also heard him play Berio’s Sequenza X and he showed me that he could throat sing (this was of special interest to me, since I lead a double life as a throat singing vocalist). The core of my compositional praxis is person-specific music, music that is (at least initially) composed in such a way to highlight the extraordinary sonic potential of remarkable musicians. Often, my person-specific music integrates techniques that are, as of yet, unique to a specific performer. When I heard Philippe and got to know his repertoire and the range of sounds he could make, as well as his fierce artistic integrity, it seemed to me that we were meant to collaborate together. 

We planned on collaborating together ever since that summer of 2013, and the logistical realization came in the form of a commission from the Henry Mancini Institute, which graciously helped support the project in the fall of 2015. The spring before the premiere, Philippe came to visit San Francisco to play a recital at the Center for New Music. During that trip, I was able to further pick his brain about techniques and hear him demo them for me. For example, the combination of low, double pedal tones with throat singing. It worked astonishingly well. It is also exactly the kind of sound that exemplifies what I mean by person-specific - I don’t yet know of any other person in the world who can deliver these sounds. 

Compositionally, however, the combination of throat singing and double pedals delivers to me a sound that gives me a visceral, and emotional, feeling that no other sound communicates. The expressive end of person-specific means is this: the expansion of expressive potential mediated through new musical techniques. Around the time I was composing this piece, I was reading the facsimile of The Getty Apocalypse Manuscript, Medieval illuminations of the Book of Revelations. I was inspired by the portrayals of angels heralding the end of times with trumpet fanfares. I feel something eschatological in the zeitgeist today, and this piece ruminates on that sense of danger and consequence. The piece, if I may be so bold, is also a kind of “apocalypse” for the trumpet, one that hopefully heralds a new world of possibilities. One final tidbit.  The end of the piece features several minutes of microtonal inflections on a circular-breathed note. Physio-valence, that is, the empathic revivification of a physical feat, observed in the body of the performer and recreated in the body of the listener, curates local fluctuations of tension and release, that is meant to balance the hyper-physicality of earlier sections (alas, a denouement), as well as create a space for mindfulness. That virtuosic exhalation is my hope for exorcising the tensions in the world that read in the current zeitgeist (as the Medieval world must have at times) as eschatological. 

Fanfares For The Apocalypse

Ruggine (for string quartet + electronics, 2019 - Casa Ricordi)
co-commissioned by Fondazione I Teatri Reggio Emilia / De Sono Associazione per la Musica
written for / dedicated to / premiered by:  Quartetto Maurice
Live recording:  09.11.2019 @ Willem Twee Concert Hall, Den Bosch (NL) - 
November Music Festival

Ruggine

Ruggine (2019)

AI Phantasy (2020) electroacoustic sound composition
Total duration 11' 12 minutes

© Panayiotis Kokoras

AI Phantasy [tape]

Harbinger

*** Important Note:  This is a binuaral mix. For an accurate audio rendering please use headphones ***

Performed by Arditti Quartet and SWR Symphonieorchester on February 8, 2020 at ECLAT Festival.
Conductor: Michael Wendeberg

About the work:

Goethe once described architecture as petrified music. Referring to Goethe, author Tim Rutherford-Johnson suggests that the aim of my works is no different than “dissolving an ancient amber and letting a trapped insect fly away”, and reversing this petrification when engaging with spatial constructs. Named after Johnson’s text, this work is written for two interdependent compositional works, written separately for string quartet and orchestra, which can be performed simultaneously or as stand-alone works. As stand-alone works, these pieces reflect autonomous musical discourses. The simultaneous work conveys an interfacing medium, through which these two historically significant musical settings meet without offering a “concerto” or related form. This encounter is revealed by the interplay between the physical and the perceived spaces. The latter, to me, is composed of mental reproductions resulting from the way in which sound sources interact with the listener. As the string quartet unfolds its character during the piece, the orchestra engages with the perceived space by re-constituting the characteristics of a sonic-architecture inferred from a spatial design and articulates the physical space.

For this design, I intended to work on The Church of Holy Apostles, which was once located in Constantinople and demolished following the Turkish takeover to make way for the renowned Fatih Mosque. Aside from its influence on major architectural designs, this church appealed to me as it embodied concepts such as cultural desolation, dislocation, and deconstruction, which shape the constellation of acts that portray today’s social and political space in my homeland.

It was inevitable that any design I would model would be a hypothetical one, as there is either very limited or unreliable documentation for this church. By designing a hybrid structure based on both the Church of the Holy Apostles and Fatih Mosque, I decided to work on a model that is also hypothetical, but primarily reflects on these concepts. This is, however, a computational model, designed only for sound analysis purposes. I mapped out the inner acoustic structures of this hypothetical space and studied its transformative aspects by conducting 3D particle tracing tests. In doing so, the timbral morphology yielded by the sonic-architecture is analyzed for varying listening and sound source positions and reformulated for the orchestration means used in the work.

"... like dissolving ancient amber and letting a trapped insect fly away." (Binaural mix)

the Sea They Think They Hear
for soprano, flute, harp, piano, violin, viola and violoncello | 2021

Written for and performed by the Wet Ink Ensemble and Gelsey Bell
Recorded at Scholes Street Studio
Mix and Mastering by Murat Çolak

Text

The ocean, deep blue-green.
What we learn in the middle of the night is that the world makes us flinch. (Michel Serres, The Five Senses: Philosophy of Mingled Bodies)
Sounds an ocean, drinks it in.

Then everything became worse for the wear, damaged, used and used-up and ultimately destroyed.
More and more I made up for what was lost, I slowly improved myself, and I considered myself healed. (Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina)

I found myself trapped in a nightmare, standing alone at the sea. Everyday becoming more and more.
White and yellow and gray and horizonless. (Tove Jansson, The Summer Book)

the Sea They Think They Hear (2021)

Created for the Disquiet Junto Project 0474: Police Action
@disquiet

The Project: Complete a trio by adding a track to an existing duet by two other musicians.

I added two tracks of a Volca FM organ patch + Avalanche Run delay/reverb to fill out the bass and add some mid-high overtones and slight counter melody to tracks from @anotherbenjamin and @homeontheland . You can find their first two parts of our trio here:
https://soundcloud.com/anotherbenjamin/jam-time-2-of-3
https://soundcloud.com/homeontheland/jam-time-1-of-3-by-the-land-disquiet0472

More on this 474th weekly Disquiet Junto project – Police Action (3 of 3) / The Assignment: Complete a trio by adding a track to an existing duet by two other musicians – at:

https://disquiet.com/0474/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0474-police-action/

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

"... like dissolving ancient amber and letting a trapped insect fly away." (Binaural mix)

Turgut Erçetin

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