"Like spit and squashed things, stains are also radically specific - always stain-shaped. They might remind one of something..."
-- Martin Arnold

“It's one thing to bear witness to the nonsense of our concrete moment...but I think it's quite another to bear witness
to worlds that are not yet concrete...Artifacts belong to certain worlds...it allows you a kind of vehicle to get into that
world, even if it is a world so distant from anything that makes sense to you today...to understand which picture of the human does an artifact or representational technique can form.”
--Patricia Reed

"I may see as a dream / The songs inviting me there"
--Golik Jaupi

Reading session by the Black Oak Trio at Northwestern University, April 2021.

Unadaptive Artefacts In The Moon's Stained Hand

"Since the fi􏰂rst half of this work appeared to me in a dream, and I took it to have hauntological portents. Pieces of what I once knew of the string quartet are cut loose, went away, come back. The devices, the rhetoric of a history-laden tradition, are gathered, only to come apart at the seams, or under their own past weight
.
For a moment it becomes sentimental, almost meaning something, perhaps familiar, but mostly not. As we contend with the spectres of our past, the best I can manage is to set forward what was broken as
some sort of whole in itself."

(Bonus points if you can find the quote)

Composed 2019-2020. Performance by Spektral Quartet as part of workshop sessions at the Bienen School of Music, March 2021.

In Sincerity, Devices Come To Outsecure

concerto for trumpet, harp, cello,
& orchestra c. 17-19 minutes

for the Sonder Trio &
Chicago Composer’s Orchestra, commissioned for their 10th anniversary
(recorded by Nick Broste, editing/mixing by the composer)

~

This piece started as an idea to create a work featuring the unique instrumental trio of trumpet, harp, and cello with orchestral, for a concert themed after “deserts”. But the desert that came to mind at that time wasn’t one from the natural world, but the mysterious barren landscape of Salvador Dali’s “Archeological Reminiscence of Millet's ‘Angelus’ ” (pictured below). Colossal figures taking up the land yet themselves turned to something elsewhere, it suggested an unfolding of awe and density and yet still clarity, to be understood from various angles of approach.

The presence of harp, and the tripartate nature of the trio further reinforced the idea of some kind of angel (the old weird kind that justifies saying “be not afraid”), and Walter Benjamin’s writing on the ‘angel of history’ came up. Glossing on Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus” , Benjamin imagines a figure who sees history not as an unfolding of events, but a pile of debris gathering under the figure, who is violently propelled into the future by the ‘storm’ of progress, though “The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.” It’s an enticing metaphor all around to adapt to musical form, which has a history yet breaks down into sound-images, not stories, per the quote up top.

So the piece carries this adaptation out, up to a point, in which the “angel” trio is propelled over the orchestral “landscape” dominated by the imposing approach of some great landmark shaping the field of the piece as a whole, with local regions of tonality, bitonality, timbral weathers, etc.

In its approach, the angel too, awakens the landscape, and its features shape the regions to, and get shaped in turn. This is where the second part of the title comes in: “genius loci”, the ‘spirit of place’ which tends to the place via these changes, in both cooperation and agonism with these changes being an inevitable form of progress. The angel would like to be beyond it all, as Benjamin supposes, but it is embedded already in that it would observe as debris--there is no position “outside” the landscape and its history, try as the trio might through its strides and flourishes.

Thus, thee distortions and energies intensify the ‘closer’ the trio gets to the ‘center’ of the piece, and in a cadenza, the most imposing sound-image-icon-landmark becomes ‘blasted out of time’ ala Benjamin, and experienced in its still fragments. But “progress” kicks in again, and perversely moves the form in reverse, and what was ‘made whole’ becomes yet another form of debris.

So admittedly, a lot of metaphors and images are jumbled up here, but hopefully in a productive, creative tension about space, time, and the ‘nature’ of development, using and stilting the ‘drama’ of the concerto setup. So all this can be imagined, or not, but with attention to the powers of imagination that are suffused by all of the sound.

Angelus Loci

September 20, 2023
with thanks to organizer Josh Harlow and fellow vibe and bill-sharer Preyas Roy

Solo at Tangible Books (excerpt)

For choir and obbligato improviser; 
text from Lamentations 1:12 and "The Cry" by Denise Levertov, with permissions from New Directions Publishing

Commissioned & premiered by Khorikos with Charlotte Greve (alto saxophone), November 12, 2023, Shrine Church of St. Anthony of Padua, NYC.

The first line of Lamentations 1:12 is a question in the original Hebrew: “Is it nothing to you?” This is missed in the vulgate Latin translation into the widely spread "O vos omnes", but the question is more pertinent. Not only a call for help or pity, but implicitly a warning. Matthew Henry’s 1710 commentary puts it concisely: "Jerusalem sitting dejected on the ground calls on those that passed by to consider whether her example did not concern them. Her outward sufferings were great but her inward sufferings were harder to bear through the sense of guilt. Sorrow for sin must be great sorrow and must affect the soul.” Our sorrows now are certainly “great”, especially oriented towards a future whose imagination is inextricable from the specter of a more total destruction than ever before. Hence Denise Levertov’s poem, “The Cry,” which gives voice to that inward suffering through the very impossibility: “Nothing for eloquence / no rhetoric / fits / that unrendering” — paradoxically, it only made sense to try and work through this nothing, to sing in its face with the old and new words, to know your NOW only through what it could be, and choose accordingly with the ineffable escape route of sounds: the bird, the child, the choir, the saxophone. These real and poetic things, and the very efficacy of how they articulate themselves, are constantly shifting around uneasily over the course of this piece.

Is It Nothing

Ben Zucker's latest solo project brings together several threads in his varied and prolific output into a dynamic flow of vibraphone-powered electroacoustic intensity.

The centerpiece of the album, "Aloier-Abyme," comes from a single-take session in Zucker's home studio with an interactive software setup listening to pitch and volume to shape cascading feedback and resampling, creating an ever-evolving field of sound surrounding and augmenting the architectural precision of the live performance. The music ricochets from rhythmic patterns across registers to narrow, unstable drones, ready to re-erupt at a moment's notice through the collaboration of human and machine improvisation.

The bookend tracks, crafted out of other performances using the same setup, reveal another side of this volatile, crystalline system. Soft, insistent repetitions undergird layers of samples reconciling shifting drone and explosive glitch that fold together into collages straddling mystery and organic inevitability.

Zucker's previous albums have highlighted their expertise an in-demand improviser around Chicago, as well as an immersive proclivity in sound design and ambient music informed by years of work in contemporary composition and theater. Until Alikes represents an exciting new direction for Zucker's constantly shifting artistry.
credits
releases October 18, 2024

Ben Zucker - vibraphone, live electronics, editing, mixing
© 2024 Ben Zucker Sounds (ASCAP)
www.benzuckersounds.com
@benzuckersounds

Mastering by Angel Marcloid at Angel Hair Studios
angelhairaudio.com
@fire_toolz at @angelhairaudio

Art by Ben Zucker
Design by Chien-An Yuan

1473 Records 2024
1473.39

Alike Untils - Aloier - Abyme (excerpt)

"when we arrive at home", for SATB voices, based on "Hallelujah" from The Sacred Harp. Premiered by members of the New York Virtuoso Singers at Wesleyan University, May 1, 2015.

when we arrive at home

From Two Poems By Carl Andre. Text from "one hundred sonnets". Premiered by members of the New York Virtuoso Singers at Wesleyan University, May 1, 2015.

Two Poems By Carl Andre: Sea

From Two Poems By Carl Andre. Text from "Yucatan" and the DIA: Beacon protests in 2014. Premiered by members of the New York Virtuoso Singers at Wesleyan University, May 1, 2015.

Two Poems By Carl Andre: Yucatan/A Hocket For Ana Mendieta

"in/difference" for three instruments, by Ben Zucker. Workshop recording by Tre Voci, at Brunel University, October 13, 2015.
(audio & photo courtesy of Matt London)

In/difference

Premiere of "Signs Of Cold" for 4 four voices, by the Melos ensemble as part of the 2017 Festivalis Druskomanija in Liskiava, Lithuania.

"This piece is half-significations of a winter landscape..."

Signs Of Cold

Live at Comfort Station, November 2, 2017, using just two desk bells and a handy Line 6 DL4!
Technically, the bells were for Sam Scranton. But considering the day, it could also be some bells for Samhain...

Some Bells For Sam

Iridescent Lines Of Flight

For ensemble. Premiered by the Bienen School of Music Contemporary Music Ensemble, February 9, 2019.

“Could nature ever obliterate all our traces? How would it undo our monumental cities and public works, and reduce our myriad plastics and toxic synthetics back to benign, basic elements? Or are some so unnatural that they’re indestructible?”

— Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

"The exuberant subjection of antique elements in a structure which, without uniting them in a single whole, would, in destruction, still be superior to the harmonies of antiquity...”
—Walter Benjamin, OnThe Origins Of German Tragic Drama


These fragments above may shape the fragments of music that continue to populate this piece. A variant on the title of a documentary on Anselm Kiefer (itself a variant on a phrase from the Book Of Isaiah),
Grass Has Grown IntoYour Cities postulates a world past form and craft, and what has life, sound, and impetus beyond it. Music continuing without knowing why, as best as it can, possibly, at this point, in and for itself.

Grass Has Grown Into Your Cities

A meditation and lament on air and possible worlds. Purchase and download here: https://zvibes.bandcamp.com/track/breath-must-be-had-by-all

All proceeds from sales of this track will go to the Chicago Freedom School. Black lives matter.

Breath Must Be Had By All

Composition, improvisation, instrumentalization, realizations.

Zvibes

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