Three new releases
Collaborations with J. Soliday, Hound Dog Taylor's Hand, and Christopher Adler
The fruits of collaborations old and new, all ripening just in time for the final Bandcamp Friday (December 4):
Flash Fouls
Chicago-based electronic musician J. Soliday and I have been playing more-or-less-weekly live-streamed “rehearsals” since August. That process has been a bulwark of sanity: keeping us connected to the joys of musicmaking, and reminding us of the social dimensions of our artform. Through play, chat, experiment, and iteration we’ve honed an aesthetic that is rich and strange - which leads to this week’s public launch of our new project, neural goldberg.
J. is performing using a modular synth rig laden with enough feedback paths and complexity to produce unpredictably evolving sound; meanwhile, I’m using custom software that barks out continuously developing variations on a theme. Call it “supervised machine improvisation,” perhaps, or “loosely coupled generative systems”: it feels like the electronics propose ideas, while the human performers listen and communicate by nudging and influencing the direction of the machines. Our opening salvo, Flash Fouls, is brimming with gritty sounds and densely layered textures - but also with double handfuls of humor, joy, and rhythmic vigor.
HDTH AND, part 1
Earlier this year, Seattle improvising guitarist and experimental musician Jeffery Taylor reached out to ask if I would contribute a recording to a new project he was developing. I sent him some materials, without having too much sense of how he might use them, and then went on with other tasks.
This week Jeffery’s band Hound Dog Taylor’s Hand announced the release of HDTH AND, part 1, and oh my goodness am I delighted by the way that they seamlessly fit and recontextualized my contribution into their music and aesthetic. Each piece on the record includes a different set of guest collaborators (I appear on track 4, “Riot Cake”), and it’s a gripping listen from beginning to end. All proceeds from the album will be directed to support Food Lifeline, a charity working to end hunger in Western Washington.
Triangulations: works for solo khaen
I’ve worked with musician, colleague, and friend Christopher Adler for almost two decades now. He is a gifted composer, a skilled pianist, and a wonderful conversationalist. He’s also perhaps the foremost exponent of the khaen: a mouth organ native to Laos and Northeastern Thailand, related to the Chinese sheng and Japanese sho. In 2008, Christopher invited me to compose for the khaen, and very graciously provided me with extensive instruction in its capabilities and performance practice. I suspect that, among other motivations, he was impishly curious to see how a composer then deeply committed to chromatic dissonance and even quarter-tone microtonality would write for a diatonic instrument.
The result was Triangulation - beautifully recorded by Christopher and now available on his new album Triangulations: New music for khaen, volume one. Revisiting the piece, I’m struck by the ways in which the limited selection of pitches inspired me to make new and different choices about the harmonic through line of the piece, and by the ways in which the instrumental technique informed my compositional choices more generally. Most of all, it’s a pleasure to revisit the compelling and gorgeous sound of the khaen.
Catching up
In July, Jake Rodriguez and J. Soliday graciously invited me to perform on their collaborative improvisation live-stream series Principles Of Non-Isolation In Audio - which is the origin story for neural goldberg. The concert is archived if you’re curious to hear the first time that J. and I matched wits. And it looks like we’ll be celebrating the release of Flash Fouls with a new performance on December 13th (at 8pm EST) - stay tuned to https://www.jsoliday.com/PONIIA as we finalize plans for that event, and tune in at soundcrack.net to join us.
In August, I spent an extraordinary week with longtime collaborator Miranda Cuckson preparing a pair of outdoor, limited-audience performances of Luigi Nono’s La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura under the auspices of the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC). We worked with director Zack Winokur and choreographer Julia Eichten to develop a number of subtle enhancements to the staging the piece requires. I’ve long known that Miranda is a phenomenal violinist, but it was still jaw-dropping to see her absorb choreographic movement into her performance, and to see how rethinking the staging of Nono’s piece from the foundations enriched our interpretation of the music.
At the workbench
This newsletter has already run quite long, so I’ll just say that the electronic instrument I’ve written about in previous installments has gotten heavy exercise in the Flash Fouls and HDTH AND, part 1 projects. And while I thought I was largely finished with the audio and music side of the project, those experiences have encouraged me to pursue a number of additional features. The latest addition is a complex network of delay lines - the better to create complex stutters, dramatic whooshes, kaleidoscopic textures, and above all unpredictable feedback behaviors…
Nonce
Optical distortions courtesy of John Granzow.
Thanks for reading and listening -
Yours,
Christopher
Christopher Burns
http://sfsound.org/~cburns