Q&A about 'Without' with Clara de Asís

“In order to form a whole, you have to be simultaneously with and without the rest of the elements.”

YZ (Yuko Zama):  I heard from Greg and Erik that they asked you to write this piece 'Without' for their duo. Can you tell me what came up in your mind when you were thinking about writing a piece for a duo of violin and percussion, or particularly for this duo of Greg and Erik?

CA (Clara de Asís):  I wrote this piece particularly for Greg and Erik. Even if I knew and highly appreciated each of their respective works and collaborations, I had never listened to their work as a duo before. My first exposure to their duo was their recording of Eva-Maria Houben’s ‘Duos’, a wonderful album that they had recorded recently, which they introduced to me during our first exchange. What struck me from their realization was that I found a great symbiosis between the two, but both kept the uniqueness that distinguishes their voices. As if it was precisely because of, or through that individual uniqueness that they reached each other and achieved a form of unity. I could feel this very clearly.

I can say this was one of the main (or part of) thoughts that I had in mind when I started working on the piece. So I contemplated two “parallel” existences that would have an organic relation. Like looking at no matter what vision, what landscape, what direction. We can see elements that exist individually, but still in permanent relation with each other, bringing up something else, something arising from that.

Erik Carlson (photo © Jill Steinberg), Greg Stuart (photo © Tom Stuart)

YZ:  Was there anything that inspired you to write this piece? (Like some particular influence from some art, film, music, landscape, your own experience, etc.)

CA:  I don’t think I get conscious inspiration from things that I’d apply directly, but it’s rather that the things that inspire me, act on me in a surreptitious way, on the inside, and I guess that some of them end impregnating, indirectly or without my conscious knowledge, what I do. Because if they act on me, they necessarily act on what I do. During the period when I was working on the piece, I was very marked by the book of Simone Weil’s La personne et le sacré. It’s a very lucid reflection on the concept of ‘person’, and how the ‘sacred’ lies beneath impersonality – and far from collectivity. I was also very impressed by her thoughts on love and on attention as the purest form of generosity. Maybe this has influenced the piece somehow – I can imagine it has, but I don’t really know.

YZ:  Can you tell me about the title "Without", like any thought or concept behind the title?

CA:  I came to the word ‘Without’ after some time, in the last place, once that the piece was composed. It came as a verbalization of some thoughts that I had been having, but that weren’t shaped with words. At first, ‘Without’ just felt right. Then I realized how much it is related to what I said for the first question. It’s not about lack or absence - there is ‘with’ in ‘without’ -. It’s a word that expresses – or even that shows – that every combination is made out of autonomous elements, that must be able to live, to exist, to form a whole together.

For the with to be possible, there must be a without.

It expresses the ambivalence of the elements in a whole. Because for a whole to exist, the elements are together, are with each other, but in order to be so, every element must also exist without the rest; exist, let’s say, individually. In order to form a whole, you have to be simultaneously with and without the rest of the elements.

Also, that word, ‘Without’, I was feeling in the piece some kind of affinity with it. Because of the simplicity of the piece. Simplicity versus addition.

‘Without’ evokes lightness to me.

YZ:  My impression of the piece was that it contains some sort of a minimal silent beauty which resonates with an aesthetic of a Zen garden while containing the Western aesthetics in the colors and the textures of the sounds (as well as the vibrant energy underneath), in the meditative stillness. It is a simple but well-thought composition with the perspective of the 'openness' and the 'depth'. The intensity of the sparse sounds and silences is remarkable, and most of all, it feels so organic like watching a landscape in nature. Did you have any particular image (or anything) in your mind when you conceive and compose this piece?

CA:  I really like your impression of the piece and it touches me deeply, because I feel a great affinity with the image that you evoked. The image of a landscape was indeed present to me when I was conceiving the piece – landscape as a whole of elements that exists individually, but still in permanent relation with each other, unwittingly, bringing up something else, something arising from that.

YZ:  When I listened to the mix of Without for the first time, I was particularly interested in how the ‘silence’ in your piece felt different from other composers’ works I was familiar with. Silence could obtain various different natures depending on how it was incorporated into a composition or a performance – it could feel like a sound, it could obtain a weight, or it could feel as if it was changing the way time passes by, or it could feel awkward if not applied in the right context.

To me, your ‘silence’ felt very organic and unpretentious, containing serene stillness with no extra heaviness or indication. It has a quiet intensity and consistency with lucid consciousness, but has a natural openness with no pressure. To experience this silence through your piece was somewhat very refreshing to me, like entering a new dimension that I had not known before yet somewhat felt so familiar. How do you define ‘silence’ in your piece, or in other words, what do you see, hear, and experience in ‘silence’ as an element in a composition?

CA: I experience silence as a part of the sound itself. Every sound contains silence. I consider the sounds beyond their highest peak of evidentiality. They are more than just an audible phenomenon. When a sound stops sounding, it hasn’t finished yet; it’s still there. It’s like the rain: rain is not only water falling from the sky. We still have the feeling of rain once it has stopped falling: there’s the humidity, the puddles on the floor, the reflection of lights, the fresh smells. Rain is still experienced even after it has stopped falling. Rain is not only water falling from the sky, it is also the fallen water. So is sound to me: sound is not only what comes through our ears, it is also what has come previously.

Reducing the sounds only to their audible dimension would be like reducing a plant only to its visible result. But there are many other subtle forms of their existence.

We can still perceive things once their highest degree of intensity has decayed. In the case of the senses other than the ear, this is commonly accepted. For instance: after tasting a fruit, we still have the taste of it in our mouth; after staring at a candle, we close our eyes and we see the light; after touching a hot surface, our skin feels hot. – Why would the ear be different?

So I try to adopt a listening attitude that is receptive to the wholeness of what I consider a sound to be, including their silence.

YZ:  How did you feel about the way Greg and Erik responded to your composition "Without" and realized it?

CA:  Something that I had found individually in both Greg and Erik and that impressed me was (and is) the extreme attention of their listening, and besides a great sensitivity, intelligence and humbleness, and a very precise and subtle technique, how the act of listening is central on their practice.

I just love their realization of the piece. I feel very grateful for their work. I had composed the piece for them to make it exist and they made it exist. Before listening to their realization, I had a sound image idea in my head, but I didn’t have an exclusive expectation about how everything “should” sound. Even if it has a very precise structure, the piece is also open in many aspects, and that openness was for them to go through it. When I listened to their realization for the first time, I was very impressed by how the feeling that I was perceiving of it, matched exactly with the feeling that I had of it when composing it. It’s a wonderful realization.

diagrams for Clara de Asís - Without

YZ:  In 'Without', it is interesting since the two performers seemed to switch sides at some point in the piece. Erik was heard on the left and Greg on the right at first, but then they were on the opposite sides in the end. Erik explained me that they did not switch their positions during the recording session, and it was done digitally during the mixing stage as you requested, so the positions of the two players can be perceived to be slowly switching over the course of the whole piece. I think these diagrams are quite fascinating. Can you explain what you aimed by switching the positions of the two performers along with these diagrams?

CA:  The thoughts about the space and the motion in the piece came once the score was finished, and Erik and Greg let me know that they were going to record it.

To me, the mixing stage and the recording set up are both directly related to the image of the space in the piece (whereas the writing stage has to do more with time). In this particular piece, concerning the space, what felt the most organic and natural to me, was this circularity.

I didn't want Erik and Greg's voices to be in a specific point of the stereo field and not move from there, this would have reduced them to a "call-response" effect that just wasn't coherent with the piece, that wasn't the point at all. And if their positions had switched more or less randomly, a natural flow would had been lost.

I think that the same feel that I had while composing the piece aimed my decision to switch their positions very slowly. It's, again about two existences in parallel that develop very organically; at a point they converge, then each continues their own way. This parallelism creates a form of unity, and at the same time, both voices are individual. Also, the fact that the voice starting at R ends up at L, and the one at L ends up at R, introduces a form of cycle. The first diagram represents this motion: the line from L to R and vice-versa draws visually a diagonal (and, consequently, an X), but perceptibly, I feel it more as an open circle. Each voice draws a half circle, and, in the end, the combination of both forms a whole circle (a cycle).

Why choose to switch positions during the mixing stage and not directly during the recording, there were many reasons. You can be a lot more meticulous about the exact position of each voice in the stereo field. Besides that, I was interested in the motion, but I didn't want the motion to imply a result of the sound distancing away from the listener. Getting the motion but not the effect of distancing away from the mic would have been technically more complicated to do during the recording; and the studio where it was recorded would have been attached to the acoustic representation of the space in the piece. Yet I wanted it to be an abstract space, not a print of a particular location.

And if they had done it during the recording, I think that it would have implied a presence in the piece, their physical presence, their bodies moving, even subtlety. While I think that it can be definitely interesting and it's something I’d like to work on maybe at some point, that wasn't the aim of this specific piece. – The second diagram is a suggestion of the position of the mics.

YZ:  I saw your live performance in a duo with Lucie Vítková at Keith Rowe's event in NYC this October. I thought it was great. During the performance, you created an intense atmosphere while keeping a wonderful openness, never losing the consistency of the entire flow of the music in spite that your performance contained a large amount of silence.

I often feel that many musicians tend to rely on 'spontaneity' a little bit too much in a hasty way during a live performance (especially in improvisation), trying to fill the space with sounds as minute and various as possible, which often feels as if it narrows down the potential of the music with subjectivity and weakens the structure (to me).

But your performance was anchored in the core of the piece with stability, letting the music flow in an open space by believing what would occur in the course of the set with a great confidence. I was impressed with how you kept the calmness throughout the piece, listening to the sounds and the silences keenly, patiently waiting for the simple minimal sounds to grow in the silence as the music develops, and seeing how simple elements of sounds and silences could accumulate to form a music over the time. Silences felt so organic and seamless as a part of music in your duo performance. I think it was very courageous to keep such an open space with so minimal elements yet never lose its intensity. I found a similar serenity in Erik and Greg’s duo recording in your 'Without', too. I think this naturalness and openness are significant natures that make your music so distinctive.

CA:  Thank you very much for your words about my performance at Keith's event. I appreciate that a lot. I must say that I feel a big affinity with your way of listening, because the things that you highlighted are precisely what I value the most. I feel exactly the same way about spontaneity in live concerts, especially in improvised music. It can lead to a display of self expression and make the music to be, in the end, something about the person who is playing, and not about the sounds. Maybe one of the reasons why that happens is that, when performing, the perception of time is other than the "regular" one, and the risk of impatience is bigger. A response to that impatience is, very often, to fill the silence and vary as much as possible. I also think that, in general, we all, artists or not, are constantly incited to "express" ourselves in the society we live in. And this can prevent us from actually listening to what exists around us.

I didn't know how our duo performance at Keith’s event would go, since there were some factors that introduced a certain unclarity to me, especially the fact of not having been able to travel with my guitar, and also being in a situation of improvisation, which I barely practice anymore. But it was great to perform with Lucie, and we had had the opportunity to exchange and work on the performance beforehand. Even in situations that include an amount of uncertainity (and I guess this is also good), my approach to sounds and music remains the same - maybe it's much about trusting the sounds. I'm really happy that it touched your sensibility.

(Interview conducted by Yuko Zama, September - October 2018)

Clara de Asís and Lucie Vítková duo at the afternoon shows of Keith Rowe: Extended at Mannes School of Music, NYC (October 13, 2018) photo © Bob Burnett 

Clara de Asís - Without (elsewhere 004) is available at the label's website (CD, lossless digital 16/44, HD FLAC 24/96), Bandcamp (CD, Lossless Digital 16/44, streaming), Metamkine (CD) and ftarri shop (CD).

PRESS RELEASE: Stefan Thut - about (elsewhere 005)

Stefan Thut composed 'about' in 2017 for a sextet as a part of the first concert series of the art and music project ame, commissioned by Ryoko Akama, a UK-based sound artist/composer/performer and a co-curator of ame. Akama gathered four fellow musicians who were empathetic with Thut's aesthetics to perform and record the piece. The ensemble consisted of Akama (electronics), Stephen Chase (guitar), Eleanor Cully (piano), Patrick Farmer (metal percussion), lo wie (tingsha), and Thut (cello), who have diverse backgrounds in music, poetry and literature, and comprised a multilingual group.

Thut integrated both musical elements and non-musical elements in his piece 'about'. His score instructs three performers to make percussive, ringing, and electronic sounds while three other performers play short high register pitches on their musical instruments according to written scores, particularly paying attention to the decay of sound in the subsequent silence. It also instructs parallel activities in between playing the sounds; walking around the space, and uttering monosyllabic words quietly in their own languages. (The title 'about' derived from a sentence 'walking about'.)

By going back and forth between these two activities - one with playing the sounds as a group, and the other with individual activities of their own - standing up, making a few steps, and saying a word, the ensemble created a unique openness in the music while each keeping their own contemplative individual experience as a component. Through this piece, Thut also demonstrated the idea that "something vanishing creates a state of pure attentiveness,” letting the performers and the listeners experience how the short sounds like hit, plucked, ringing or bowed sounds attribute a meaning to the silences before and after. These silences are soon getting replaced by something else - by the sounds from before, by the sounds in expectation, or by thoughts. 

 (Release date: October 10, 2018)

FACTS / TRACKLIST / CREDITS  

Swiss composer and cellist Stefan Thut is interested in processes and scores that invite both the performers and the listeners to delve into a world. He studied music at the Lucerne Conservatory and at Boston University School of Music. After experiences with new and experimental music, improvisation and noise, Thut started writing scores. Through his compositions he provides relatively determined systems in order to develop a praxis. In addition to instruments used in traditional ways, he also uses everyday materials as components in his work. As an interpreter he has performed a lot of music for solo cello written by his fellow and affiliated composers of the Edition Wandelweiser. Stations of his recent activities included Bilbao, Düsseldorf, London, Reykjavik, Saint Petersburg, Tokyo and Zurich among other towns. He has released albums as a composer, performer and cellist from Edition Wandelweiser and other international labels.

Ryoko Akama is a UK-based composer and performer whose work, ranging from text compositions to sound installations, pursues minimal, reductive, cumulative, and contemplative experiences. Her work aims to offer quiet temporal/spatial experiences, and is connected to literature, fine art and mixed media (technology). She employs small and fragile objects such as paper balloons and glass bottles in order to create tiny aural and visual occurrences that embody ‘almost nothing’ aesthetics. She composes text scores and performs a diversity of alternative scores in collaboration with international artists. She directs the melange edition label and is co-editor of the independent publisher mumei.

ame (art / music / experimental), based in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, is an international creative hub that supports experimental music and art, commissioning works from both emerging and established composers and sound artists. It provides concerts, installations, educational projects and artists-in-residence programs, working together with local venues and organizations.

Stefan Thut - about (2017)       58:44

Ryoko Akama - electronics

Stephen Chase - guitar

Eleanor Cully - piano

Patrick Farmer - metal percussion

lo wie - tingsha

Stefan Thut - cello

composition by Stefan Thut

project initiated by Ryoko Akama

recorded by Simon Reynell at Phipps Hall,

University of Huddersfield on September 30, 2017

mixed and premastered by Simon Reynell and Stefan Thut

mastered by Taku Unami

design and photography by Yuko Zama

text by Stefan Thut

produced by Yuko Zama

thanks to: University of Huddersfield and ame

p+c 2018 elsewhere music

www.elsewheremusic.net

PRESS RELEASE: Clara de Asís - Without (elsewhere 004)

Clara de Asís composed the piece 'Without' for the duo of Erik Carlson (violin) and Greg Stuart (percussion) in 2018. In this 43-minute piece, de Asís gave a precise framework for the position and the duration of each sound section and each silence, as well as a rough outline for the texture and the volume of each sound, the use of tone or noise (or tone-noise), and the materials for the percussion, but a large part of the score was open for the two performers' freedom. 

In the realization of this piece, Carlson and Stuart brought out the unique voice of each instrument by applying various use of bows on violin and various percussive materials (metal, wood, ceramic, clay, glass, etc.) with their attentive, virtuosic skills and great sensitivities for the sound and silence. Moving along in parallel, Carlson and Stuart showed their individual musical personalities while creating an organic flow, with an exquisite balance between preciseness and openness. The duo’s introspective approach to the sound and silence in this piece evokes the tranquility of a Zen garden while showing a clean contemporary edge, highlighting the simple yet intense beauty of de Asís's minimal composition. David Sylvian’s cover photograph of the small stones, each of which has a unique color and texture, faintly illuminating in the pitch-black background, echoes the mysterious depth and the lucidity of de Asís's piece.

(Release date: October 10, 2018) 

FACTS / TRACKLIST / CREDITS 

Clara de Asís is a Spanish composer and guitarist based in Marseille, France. She studied cinema at college, and has developed her fascination with the sound in films into her own sound recording and editing. After moving to France to study electroacoustic composition, she started collaborating with other musicians. De Asís's intuitive, unconventional composition style utilizes a minimal, spatial framework in which performers can create individual sounds with personal instrumentation incorporating active listening, attaining a paradoxical but coherent result, "setting a frame could bring out a lot of unexpected possibilities and revelations that come from the sound itself." Her music has been showcased in many international scenes including Berlin, Paris, Prague and New York. Besides actively releasing collaboration albums in recent years, her 2018 solo album 'Do Nothing" (Another Timbre), on which she played guitar and percussion on a set of her six compositions, was extremely well received.

Erik Carlson is a violinist who has performed as a soloist and with many chamber and orchestral ensembles throughout Europe and the Americas, while working as a composer himself. He is a highly active performer of contemporary music and has had works written for him by numerous composers, including Karlheinz Stockhausen, Tom Johnson, Jürg Frey, Christian Wolff and Georges Aperghis. He has also made premiere recordings of dozens of works by other composers.

Greg Stuart is a percussionist whose work draws upon a mixture of music from the experimental tradition, Wandelweiser, improvisation, and electronics. He has also been an invaluable percussionist performing a large body of works of Michael Pisaro and other contemporary composers, while also working on his own projects, collaborating with various experimental musicians including Tim Feeney, Sarah Hennies, Ryoko Akama, Eva-Maria Houben, Antoine Beuger, Frey, and Kunsu Shim.

Carlson and Stuart have been working together as a duo in the last few years, and their 2018 digital self-release of Houben’s ‘Duos' was highly acclaimed. They also performed together on Frey's 2017 album Ephemeral Constructions (Edition Wandelweiser).

Clara de Asís - Without (2018)    43:10

Erik Carlson - violin
Greg Stuart - percussion

recorded by Erik Carlson and Greg Stuart at Conrad Prebys Music Center, UCSD, La Jolla, CA on July 9, 2018
mixed by Erik Carlson
cover photo and inside photo by David Sylvian
design by Yuko Zama
produced by Erik Carlson, Greg Stuart, and Yuko Zama
executive produced by Jon Abbey

p+c 2018 elsewhere music
www.elsewheremusic.net

PRESS RELEASE: Jürg Frey - 120 Pieces of Sound (elsewhere 003)

Jürg Frey’s unique compositional approach places him at the cutting edge of contemporary classical music while simultaneously maintaining a touch of impressionistic/romantic aesthetics in its roots. Since the late 90's, Frey started to work with 'lists' as a basis of his compositions, sometimes words, sometimes chords, from which he developed and organized the musical materials. In recent years, Frey's focus on 'lists' has extended more toward the connections of items with each other, forming melodies.

Frey composed 60 Pieces of Sound in 2009, for an indefinite number of musicians; with two instruments that play the pitches as written in the score forming a two-part melody, and an open instrumentation part for any instrument(s) or sound maker(s) as 'the third voice.' Each of the 60 chords played by the ensemble is followed by a similar duration of silence. In November 2017, Frey and the Boston-based ensemble Ordinary Affects (Laura Cetilia, Morgan Evans-Weiler, J.P.A. Falzone, Luke Martin) performed '60 Pieces of Sound' as a part of their concert series in New England, and made a recording of this piece at Wesleyan University.

In this recording, Frey's clarinet and Cetilia's cello played the pitches in the two-part melody while the rest played the open instrumentation part with undetermined sounds. The resulting music was a unique series of harmonies created by open instrumental sounds with a faintly recognizable melody hidden in the core of the ensemble's evenly tempered sounds. The impressions of the chords move along at the edge of consonance and dissonance with the afterglows of each chord in the subsequent silence, hovering somewhere between meditative calmness and disquieting shadow, while bringing an organic warmth and a feeling of breathable open air into a minimal musical structure.

L’âme est sans retenue II was composed by Frey in 1997-2000, edited by him from the field recordings that Frey made in Berlin in 1997 with the addition of his bass clarinet sounds. It is the second piece of the series with the same title, after ‘L’âme est sans retenue I’ (ErstClass 002-5, 2017) and before ‘L’âme est sans retenue III’ (b-boim, 2008). Frey composed this series based on his list of ‘words’. The title of this composition series L’âme est sans retenue (“The soul is unrestrained”) is a quotation of a sentence from French poet and writer Edmond Jabès’s book ‘Désir d’un commencement, Angoisse d’une seule fin’ (Desire for a Beginning, Dread of One Single End).

In this 40-minute piece 'L’âme est sans retenue II', the similar duration of the sounds and silences alternate with each other like in '60 Pieces of Sound’. For this piece, Frey first edited the field recording parts and later added his bass clarinet sound with a certain pitch to every part as an underlying tone that would blend with the field recordings. Frey's bass clarinet is discreet and almost unrecognizable here, often hidden under the complex layers of the field recordings, and yet clarifying the harmonization of the field recordings from inside. These two pieces were not actually directly connected to each other, but presenting these two pieces '60 Pieces of Sound' and 'L’âme est sans retenue II' back to back on this album brings out the fundamental aesthetic of Frey's compositions in regards to how he approaches the ‘harmonization’ and ‘openness’ of the music.

(Release date: October 10, 2018) 

FACTS / TRACKLIST / CREDITS

Jürg Frey was born in Aarau in 1953. After studying at the Conservatoire de Musique de Geneve in Thomas Friedli’s solo class, he began a career as a clarinettist, but his activities as composer soon came to the foreground. He developed his own language as a composer and sound artist with the creation of wide, quiet sound spaces. His work is marked by an elementary non-extravagence of sound, a sensibility for the qualities of the material, and precision of compositional approach. Sometimes his compositions bypass instrumentation and duration altogether and touch on aspects of sound art. He has worked with compositional series, as well as with language and text. Some of these activities appear in small editions or as artist’s books as individual items and small editions. (Edition Howeg, Zurich; weiss kunstbewegung, Berlin; complice, Berlin). His music and recordings are published by Edition Wandelweiser. He has been invited to workshops as visiting composer and for composer portraits at the Universität der Künste Berlin, the Universität Dortmund and several times at Northwestern University and CalArts.

Jürg Frey is a member of the Wandelweiser Komponisten Ensemble which has presented concerts for more than 15 years in Europe, North America and Japan. Frey lives with his family in Aarau (Switzerland), teaches clarinet, and organizes the concert series moments musicaux aarau as a forum for contemporary music.

Ordinary Affects is an experimental music ensemble based in Boston. Experimental composers and performers J.P.A. Falzone, Laura Cetilia, Luke Martin, and Morgan Evans-Weiler make-up the ensemble, performing on piano/organ, cello, violin, and no-input mixer/objects (respectively). The ensemble was formed as a group of musicians seeking to workshop, explore, commission, and perform experimental music. While the group often focuses on the performance of written compositions, it also serves as a laboratory for improvisation and the compositions of its members. The collaborative nature of the mission ensures a group that is always in flux; instrumentation is open, always changing, and dependent on the project, concert, and membership.

Ordinary Affects has commissioned and premiered pieces by Michael Pisaro, Antoine Beuger, Sarah Hughes, Eva-Maria Houben, and Ryoko Akama, in addition to performing a number of other composers’ works including those by Joseph Kurdika, John Lely, and all members of the ensemble (Cetilia, Martin, Evans-Weiler, and Falzone).

 

Jürg Frey - 120 Pieces of Sound (elsewhere 003)

1. 60 Pieces of Sound (2009) 32:00

Ordinary Affects:
Luke Martin - electric guitar
Laura Cetilia - cello
J.P.A. Falzone - keyboard
Morgan Evans-Weiler - violin

Jürg Frey - clarinet

recorded by Luke Damrosch at Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT on November 10, 2017
mixed by Luke Damrosch and Jürg Frey
mastered by Luke Damrosch

2. L’âme est sans retenue II (1997-2000) 40:03
for field recordings and bass clarinet

Jürg Frey - field recordings, bass clarinet

recorded by Fabio Oehrli at Tonlabor Bern, Bern, Switzerland on December 2012
mixed and mastered by Fabio Oehrli (Tonlabor Bern)

cover artwork by Jürg Frey - Stück (1974) #29
design by Yuko Zama
produced by Jürg Frey and Yuko Zama

p+c 2018 elsewhere music
www.elsewheremusic.net

Upcoming releases on elsewhere for October 1, 2018

We are happy to announce new releases for October 1, 2018:

Jürg Frey - 120 Pieces of Sound (elsewhere 003)
(60 Pieces of Sound - performed by Laura Cetilia / Morgan Evans-Weiler / J.P.A. Falzone / Luke Martin / Jürg Frey)
(L'âme est sans retenue II - field recordings and bass clarinet, composed by Jürg Frey)

Clara de Asís - Without (elsewhere 004)
(performed by Erik Carlson / Greg Stuart)

Stefan Thut - about (elsewhere 005)
(performed by Ryoko Akama / Stephen Chase / Eleanor Cully / Patrick Farmer / Stefan Thut / Lo Wie)

------------------------------------------

(Reinier van Houdt - Bruno Duplant - Lettres et Replis is scheduled to be recorded late this year for 2019 release.)

photo © Jill Steinberg (Erik Carlson)
photo © Stephen Harvey (Stefan Thut, Ryoko Akama, lo wie)
photo © Susanna Bolle (Jürg Frey, Ordinary Affects)

elsewhere interview On the Record

Recently, NYC music journalist Steve Smith did an in-depth intervew with me on my label elsewhere, in which I talked about my label's orientation and aesthetics as well as my future plans for the upcoming releases. Click here if you are interested in.

nationalsawdust.org

PRESS RELEASE: Biliana Voutchkova / Michael Thieke - Blurred Music (elsewhere 001-3)

The Berlin-based Bulgarian violinist Biliana Voutchkova and German clarinetist Michael Thieke have worked together intensely within both compositional and improvisational duo and group projects in Berlin since 2011. In their current project “Blurred Music”, the duo works with musical structures that create a blur; improvised parts alternate with fields of pre-structured material in which digital recordings of the duo are duplicated by live performance. Virtually identical fragments of the live performance synchronize simultaneously with the playback, unavoidably giving rise to blur in the temporal dimension, in the rhythmic, timbral, and motivic variations, and in the microtonal interpretation of individual pitches. The live portion of the duplicated material is still improvised, but within a framework purposefully restricted by the pre-recorded material, the intervals between which are indeterminate. To perception, what is being composed in real time blurs into what has been structured in advance; the difference can be registered only after an interval, if at all.

The triple CD 'Blurred Music' features three of the duo's live performances, recorded in Chicago, Philadelphia and New York during their USA tour in December 2016. These three live recordings are all differently structured, factoring in the conditions and the atmosphere of each venue as well as the musicians' own perspective and mindset. This series of three concerts, all occurring within a nine day period, showcase the very wide range of this duo, so all three recordings combine to form a saga of their peak. Using their highly trained virtuosic skills and intense concentration, the duo carefully deconstructs the conventional tones of instruments into fine particles in an organic flow, to create a completely new world of music on their own, somewhere between tonality and atonality, and will hopefully be recognized as one of the most mature accomplishments of improvisational/compositional works of this era.

Co-produced by David Sylvian and Yuko Zama, artwork by David Sylvian. The three CD set is a limited edition of 500. Besides CD format, digital HD FLAC 24/96 files are available on the label's website, as well as CDs and lossless files on Bandcamp.

(Release Date: July 14, 2018) 

TRACK LIST

CD 1: Chicago (50:18) - recorded live on December 7, 2016 at Carr Chapel, Chicago

CD 2: Philadelphia (40:09) - recorded live on December 14, 2016 at Aux Performance Space, Philadelphia

CD 3: New York (1:09:59) - recorded live on December 15, 2016 at Experimental Intermedia, NYC

CREDITS

Biliana Voutchkova - violin/voice
Michael Thieke - clarinet
all compositions by Biliana Voutchkova and Michael Thieke
recorded live by Michael Thieke
mixed and mastered by Taku Unami
artworks by David Sylvian
design by Yuko Zama
liner notes by Michael Thieke and Biliana Voutchkova
produced by David Sylvian and Yuko Zama
executive produced by Jon Abbey
p+c 2018 elsewhere
www.elsewheremusic.net

PRESS RELEASE: Melaine Dalibert - Musique pour le lever du jour (elsewhere 002)

Melaine Dalibert (born 1979), a French composer/pianist, has been increasingly recognized for his compositional piano works as well as his interpretations of works by Gérard Pesson, Giuliano D’Angiolini, Tom Johnson, Peter Garland and many others. Trained as a classical pianist in Rennes (where he teaches now), Dalibert studied a large repertoire of contemporary composers' works at the Paris Conservatories. Being involved with experimental music at a young age, Dalibert found a way to compose music through mathematical concepts.

Fascinated by natural phenomena which are both expected and unpredictable, and also inspired by the work of the Hungarian-born French media artist Véra Molnar, Dalibert has developed his own algorithmic procedures of composition which contain the notion of stretched time evoking Morton Feldman, minimal and introspective, adopting a unique concept of fractal series. His piano music has been released on two recordings to date: Quatre pièces pour piano, self-released in 2015, and Ressac, issued by Another Timbre in 2017.

'Musique pour le lever du jour' (the title meaning 'Music for The Daybreak') was composed by Dalibert over two years and completed in 2017, with the concept being an ‘endless piece’ with no beginning or no end. This one-hour piece adopts slow tempi, leaving meditative space for long resonances in which pentatonic coloring gradually modulate in all tones, resulting in complex layers of direct tones, overtones, and prolonged reverberation, all organically subliming into rich sonorities with incredible harmonic clarity.

PRODUCER'S NOTE 

I first came to know Melaine Dalibert’s compositions and piano performances when I listened to his recital at Daniel Goode's Loft in SoHo NYC in January 2018, when he played piano pieces by Peter Garland, Michael Vincent Waller and Dalibert, including his 2017 piece 'Musique pour le lever du jour' which is featured on this album.  

When Dalibert opened the recital with Garland’s 1971 piece ‘The Days Run Away’, I was astonished by his distinct, vibrant piano tones which brought out the fullness of the music with an incredible depth of concentration and introspective serenity. Each individual note of the piano felt so vital and substantial, with profound dimensions created by the afterglow of each note, opening outward and inward simultaneously, rejuvenating Garland’s meditative masterpiece. 

In his 'Musique pour le lever du jour', Dalibert used sustained pedals to create complex layers of resonances, which was mesmerizingly well composed - as if I were watching a mirage of a minimal abstract watercolor work gradually emerging in the room. Despite that there were numerous sounds occurring in resonances, blending together in the harmonies, there was no hint of cloudiness - the clarity was striking. I also loved the touch of human warmth I felt in his piano tones, which felt like it was faintly emanating out of the frame of clean minimalism. After I posted my review on the concert, Dalibert contacted me and told me that he was looking for a label to put out his 'Musique pour le lever du jour' - the very piece I loved during the concert and was hoping to hear again. It was coincidentally around the same time when I discovered Biliana Voutchkova and Michael Thieke’s ‘Blurred Music’ and was considering to start my own label, so I almost instantly agreed to include this piece, which has captivated my mind hauntingly, as the second release from my label. 

Dalibert recorded this piece at his home studio. I particularly love the warm, woody tones of his YAMAHA piano, in which I can feel the intimacy between the pianist and the piano that he developed during his career as a pianist and composer for the last twenty years, which seemed to add a special human touch and an organic feel to the sound here. We newly recorded the piece in this March for this album at a 24-bit rate with my engineer Taku Unami’s advice. The recording was fantastic, with the 24bits/96kHz master bringing out the subtle nuances of the translucent harmonies of the rich reverbs/overtones and the warmth of Dalibert’s piano fully, which feels close to what I heard and was amazed by during his live concert in NYC. (Yuko Zama)

Produced and design by Yuko Zama, artwork by David Sylvian. The single CD is a limited edition of 500. Besides CD format, digital HD FLAC 24/96 files are available on the label's website, as well as CDs and lossless files on Bandcamp.

Release Date: July 9, 2018

TRACK LIST

Musique pour le lever du jour (2017)  1:01:33

CREDITS

To Stéphane Ginsburgh

Melaine Dalibert - piano and composition

recorded by Melaine Dalibert in Rennes, France in March 2018

mixed and mastered by Taku Unami

artwork by David Sylvian

design by Yuko Zama

produced by Yuko Zama

executive produced by Jon Abbey

www.elsewheremusic.net

℗ © 2018 elsewhere

REVIEW

Best of Bandcamp Contemporary Classical: June 2018

https://daily.bandcamp.com/2018/07/06/best-of-bandcamp-contemporary-classical-june-2018/

French pianist and composer Melaine Dalibert has gained attention for his performances of works by melodically oriented minimalists like Peter Garland and Michael Vincent Waller, but in the last couple of years his own compositions have been reaching a wider audience through his dazzling 2017 album on the British imprint Another Timbre, Ressac. Musique pour le lever du jour is his eagerly anticipated followup to Ressac, and like the pieces on that previous album, the hour-long titular work deploys algorithms as a structural tool, building what Dalibert calls “space-time blocks” to suggest the stretching and compression of time. The music also draws upon the unpredictability of the natural world, such as the way a drop of water triggers surprising ripples when it strikes a larger liquid body. This gorgeous epic unfolds slowly, with ringing overtones fusing but never muddying the foreground of the single-note patterns Dalibert continually spreads out. He considers it an “endless piece,” with no obvious beginning or end. Instead, the focus is placed upon how each delicate phrase follows the next, with lots of repetition and subtle phrase modifications producing a Morton Feldman-like splendor: restrained, ineffable, and gorgeous. In fact, it’s almost advisable to treat the performance as an immersive experience, savoring the unhurried melodic patterns and allowing the rich harmonic effects to wash over oneself as a kind of meditative bath. 

- Peter Margasak (June 6, 2018)

www.elsewheremusic.net

elsewhere On the Record

Very nice introductory article on elsewhere appeared On the Record, written by Steve Smith. 

nationalsawdust.org

introducing 'elsewhere'

After being involved with music production first as a photographer, then as a designer and co-producer for Erstwhile Records for 15 years and Gravity Wave for 8 years, I decided to start my own label. The label's name is 'elsewhere', curated by me as a producer, and Jon Abbey as an executive producer.

My label will feature mainly contemporary work which has classical music aesthetics at its roots, but it may not have to strictly belong to the area of contemporary classical music. The essential goal for my label is to find and release good music which touches my heart deeply with its lasting value, created by earnest devotion from the artist’s pure soul, which I believe I will want to listen to repeatedly for a very long time - just like I love to return to Schubert or Mahler or Monteverdi, or any past classics that move me over the course of many years. This label may also feature some music outside classical aesthetics - as long as it feels real and genuine, or something that seems as if I were hearing it in the wind or from elsewhere, far away from the noise of the real world.

The first and the second releases from the label will be:

elsewhere 001-3:  

Biliana Voutchkova / Michael Thieke Blurred Music (*triple CD set of three live recordings of the violin/clarinet duo’s compositions called ‘Blurred Music’)

elsewhere 002:

Melaine Dalibert - Musique pour le lever du jour (*Dalibert's recording of his own latest piano piece) 

We are hoping to release this first pair in the second half of 2018. After putting out this pair, our plan is to release about two titles per year. Also, we are hoping to release hi-res audio files for download in the future, in addition to the regular CD format and lossless digital.

Deep thanks to all of you who have been devoted listeners of our Erstwhile Records and Gravity Wave for giving us tremendous support for many years until today. We sincerely hope that we will be able to keep going with this new label as well as Jon Abbey's Erstwhile and Michael Pisaro's Gravity Wave label for many years, and your continuous love and support will be deeply appreciated.

- Yuko Zama (2/12/2018) 

Official FB page of elsewhere