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HI All,<br>
<br>
brand new album by American composer Wade Matthews.<br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.con-v.org/cnvcd002.html">WADE MATTHEWS - Early
Summer</a><br>
____________________________<br>
<br>
<br>
format: CD<br>
duration: 44 minutes, 10 tracks<br>
limited to 200 copies <br>
<br>
price: 11 euros - shipping included <br>
<br>
<br>
_________________________________________________<br>
<br>
<br>
EARLY SUMMER<br>
<br>
10 improvised sound collages by Wade Matthews <br>
<br>
What this music is about and how it was made<br>
<br>
<br>
These are 10 virtual soundscapes selected from among 14 made in
Madrid in late June and early July 2009, hence the name, Early
Summer. They are improvised sound collages, real-time assemblages of
field recordings (manipulated to greater or lesser degrees), noises,
electroquotes and digital synthesis. The field recordings were made
over the last two years in the San Francisco Bay area, La Mancha,
and Madrid. The noises were recorded at my studio in Madrid. There
is one electroquote, but it is significantly altered and might thus
more accurately be called an “electro-misquote.” The digital
synthesis was carried out in real time, that is, played as part of
the process of improvising these pieces.<br>
<br>
My setup contains two laptops, which I play simultaneously. The left
one is for synthesis, the right one has all the field recordings and
noises. The playing process involves triggering, stopping, filtering
and mixing the recordings on the right computer while simultaneously
playing the software synthesizer in the left computer. The results
are sent to a pair of loudspeakers, each of which has a microphone
in front of it. The mics are in turn sent to my recording setup. So
these pieces are recorded in stereo, as is. There is no remixing and
a minimum of touching up—basically just a couple of fades. I chose
this setup, rather than multi-track recording, because I wanted the
end result to really reflect the improvisatory nature of these
pieces, avoiding the temptation to “recompose” them post-facto.<br>
<br>
With some pieces I had a clear idea what materials I was going to
work with and I simply began to play, triggering and stopping them
according to how the piece evolved while simultaneously adding
touches of synthesis, sometimes for structural reasons, other times
simply as “sonic seasoning.” With other pieces, I had only one or
perhaps two sounds in mind and simply began playing, adding other
things as the piece went along. In all cases, there are two elements
that I find especially interesting about working with the medium of
sound collage:<br>
<br>
The first is the possibility of non-integrated sound spaces. In
these pieces, each of the field recordings, noises, and synthesized
sounds occupies its own space. The field recordings, for example,
occur in specific acoustic conditions that are clearly audible in
the recordings. Thus, these sound collages combine not only sounds
but also sound spaces. The sounds often coexist in time but not
necessarily in audible space. At any given time, a particular sound
may not be audibly in front of, behind or beside, another sound.
Instead, it may be in another space altogether, a more distant one,
or a closer one, a more resonant space or a dryer one. I find this
sort of spatial counterpoint very interesting as it brings out the
paradox of sounds, many of which are natural, coinciding in a way
that has only become possible in “nature” in our time. Until quite
recently, if we were in a particular sonic environment—say one with
very little resonance like the inside of a crowded bus—then any
sound we heard there would be directly affected by that acoustically
dry setting. Likewise, any sounds we heard in a large train station
would be marked by its reverberance—they might be closer or farther
away, but they would all be in that space. Now, however, we can get
on that crowded bus, shove a pair of earphones into our ears and
simultaneously be listening to the bus noises and a recording of a
string quartet performed at Carnegie Hall. The bus noises will enter
our hearing and may even cover up the sound of the string quartet at
some points, but the bus’s acoustic conditions—its lack of
resonance—will in no way reduce the reverberant field of Carnegie
Hall in which we are hearing the string quartet. Likewise, the
resonance of that hall will add no reverberation whatsoever to the
bus noises. This coexistence of different soundspaces in our
auditory field is quite new and so I’ve enjoyed exploring it here.<br>
<br>
The second is the chance to play beyond or against memory. Here, I
am not interested in combining things I know will work. I want to
combine sounds that may not work. More precisely—and this is the
crux of the matter for me—I want to combine sounds that will work in
ways I had not discovered beforehand. It’s not so much a matter of
combining disparate materials and figuring out how to make them
“work” as of using those unexpected combinations to redefine one’s
personal definition of what it means to “work.”<br>
<br>
One final observation about these pieces’ durations: I wanted to try
making short pieces, aphorisms that just present an idea and let
each listener draw his or her own conclusions about its possible
ramifications. At best—and I hope to have succeeded to at least a
small degree—they might be taken as sonic koans.<br>
<br>
[Wade Matthews]<br>
<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.con-v.org">http://www.con-v.org</a><br>
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