Morning Haze Junction

...as the glittering colors glide across the sky... (2021)
music for flute solo and 6 instrumentalists

xiaoyu lin, flute

beijing contemporary soloists:
jinyu shen (cel), ziyang wen (pf), zhiyi zhou (perc);
wendi wang (vln), mingyue yu (vla), mo mo (vlc)

erqing wang, conductor
recorded in beijing, January 2021

[cover art: "23042", by zao wou-ki]

...as the glittering colors glide across the sky... (2021)

When The Wind Rises YingTingLIN

Leaving Sao《離騷》: for voice & orchestra
Bowling Green Symphony Orchestra 
Emily Freeman Brown, conductor
Huang Ruo, voice

Leaving Sao《離騷》: for Voice & Orchestra

for string quartet and electronics

Paris, Centre Pompidou June 7th 2017
Quatuor Diotima

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

As a kid we had a television set with an antenna that rotated (you could rotate it from inside of your house). When the major channels would go off-air you could rotate it and pick up strange other channels from smaller cities around - from across the border, Buffalo and so on - and you would see strange things, that were kind of hard to see (there was a lot of static) and it was very intriguing to watch that kind of things. That was really the core, the crystal at the centre of this movie: my experience with that thinking “what if the images that you pulled up were really quite extreme, disturbing, possibly illegal, and what would you think then, would you keep seeking out those channels or would you call the police or what would you do, how would you respond to them?”

David Cronenberg on his movie Videodrome (commentary track of the Criterion Collection BlueRay)

The Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion was a television signal hijacking (probably the most famous and certainly the longest signal hijacking ever) that occurred in Chicago, Illinois, United States on the evening of November 22, 1987. The signal pirates, whose identities were never found, succeeded in getting their broadcast intruded onto WTTW (a local Public Broadcasting Service television station).
The pirate broadcast, which lasted 90 endless seconds, featured an individual disguised as Max Headroom (a sci-fi computer-generated television character quite popular in the 80s, coming from dystopian near-future dominated by television and large corporations).
Around 11:15 p.m. an episode of the British TV-Series Doctor Who was suddenly interrupted by television static, after which an unidentified man wearing a Max Headroom mask and sunglasses appeared. The man started to moan, scream and laugh, uttering various random phrases (the audio was distorted and crackling), including New Coke's advertising slogan "Catch the Wave" while holding a Pepsi can (Max Headroom was a Coca-Cola spokesperson at the time). He then tossed the can out of sight, presented his middle finger wearing a rubber extension, sang an excerpt of “I’m losing you” (a 1966 Motown hit recorded by the Temptations), hummed the theme song of Clutch Cargo (a clumsily-animated television series of the 60s), moaned painfully complaining about his piles, farted, put on and off a giant glove (similar to the one worn by Michael Jackson at the time). He then partially exposed his buttocks, howling: "They're coming to get me!”, while an unidentified female accomplice wearing a French maid outfit started to spank him with a flyswatter. The transmission then blacked out for a few seconds before resuming the Doctor Who episode in progress.

“The 1987 Max Headroom Broadcast Incident” features a string quartet “enhanced” with transducers and preparations. 
The digital processing of the instruments is largely inspired by the same modulation techniques that were - and still are - commonly used for radio and television transmission. 
The piece, an hommage to obsolete or soon-to-be deprecated technologies and to the media-dominated, dark future that the “cyberpunk” sci-fi of 80s foretold, is dedicated to the memory of Fausto Romitelli.

Mauro Lanza - "The 1987 Max Headroom broadcast incident" (2017)

“Five Postcards From The Clouds” for 4 musicians was commissioned by New Music On The Point. The first performance was given by Jessie Nucho, Tony Arnold, Claudia Fuller, and Will Yager in Salisbury Congregational Church, Vermont, USA, on June 18, 2018

“來自雲中的五張明信片”靈感來源於宋朝詩人李清照一剪梅中“雲中誰寄錦書來”。 在李清照的詞中，她把雲的另一頭比作思念和愛的人，所以雲中的錦書意為愛人的情書

The title was inspired by a sentence from the poem “I Chien Mei,” “...who sent me an embroidered letters from the clouds?” was written by an ancient Chinese poet Qingzhao Li. In her words, the person who you miss and love is from the other side of the clouds. So “an embroidered letters from the clouds” means a love letter from that lover.

five postcards from the clouds, for 4 musicians (2018)

Skiagrafies (Greek for shadow etchings) is a cycle of works that looks at color through the perspective of shadows. Skiagrafies I, which was premiered at the Kimmel Center in June of 2016, was commissioned by the PRISM quartet and the Partch Ensemble. Skiagrafies II, scored for flute and piano resonance, was written for flutist Orlando Cela. Skiagrafies III, was composed for New England Conservatory’s Wind Ensemble and dedicated to Charles Peltz and Boyang Yu.

While each work of the cycle is conceived as an autonomous organism, they all stem from the same pursuit: exploring the musical dimensions of shadows. This is done in two primary ways: first, in the exploration of minute gradations of sound parameters such as pitch, timbre, and dynamics; second, in the reflections and refractions of the same sound object across the different timbres of the instrument or the ensemble. A third, perhaps more metaphorical concept of shadows in ‘Skiagrafies’ is related to the way in which memory is engaged: each piece grows by continuously recalling and recasting distorted copies of previous material, effectively creating a veil of shadows upon shadows of the initial archetypal gesture. Time does not flow linearly, but in concentric circles, dynamic development giving way to introspective, dream-like contemplation of minute sonic spaces.

170202 NECWE

Skiagrafies III

Duo for flute and contrabass (2019)
Musicians: Andrea Biagini, Giacomo Piermatti.

SharpDop PupPipTrip (2019)

Instrumentation: Chinese bamboo flute, chromatic sheng, retuned qin, retuned zheng, retuned pipa, huqin (erhu/banhu), Percussions, piano, violin, cello.

Premiered by AIR Contemporary Music Collective at Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing, China on July 6th, 2019.

Vestige of Cartography (2019)--for mixed chamber ensemble

composer, performer, sound artist


https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVVSfuPoodg4gLqSKeM0utg?view_as=subscriber

five postcards from the clouds, for 4 musicians (2018)

Yifan Guo

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